[pwg]

From TFA it is stated that they were doing the split of lines because of the "1000 octet" maximum line length requirement of the SMTP protocol.

And, they also state that the period disappeared because it was placed at the start of the next line when the split occurred.

From which one can deduce that they were doing the most basic "split" possible, splitting at the exact 1000 octet point, i.e. something like:

   if (length(line)>1000) then:
     line1=string_range(line,0,999)
     line2=string_range(line,1000,end)
   fi

And if the period in 27.00 ended up exactly at offset 1000 in "line" then it got 'split' into line 2 as the first character of line2.

[Aloisius]

It would split at 998 characters, since each line must end with CRLF.