Comment 4 for bug 510940

I had similar problems with the tilde, see this thread: http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2011/057338.html

The "." dot issue comes up too quite often. You can search the mailing list.

All I can tell you is that this is how it is and won't/can't change. Certainly not for texexec, as the development on that front is frozen. But then again, on my machine the space issue is not present with "context", but again that might be different on other machines, see quote above.