Associative array, brace-free subscripting: key with spaces

[Clint Hepner <clint.hepner@xxxxxxxxx>]

Consider the array

    typeset -A b
    b=("a b c" d)

The following correctly expands to "d"

    ${b[a b c]}

but this results in a "bad subscript" error:

    $b[a b c]

I can't seem to find anything in the man page about why this would
be the case. It seems to be a parsing error, since using a separate
parameter to store the key works fine as well:

    z="a b c"
    print $b[$z]

--
Clint Hepner
clint.hepner@xxxxxxxxx