Close will count for now.Approximately so, yes. Not precisely so in the case of nested expansions.
Only with respect to pattern characters, but yes.
Ah, so this behavior is special. Is there some way to watch the parsing unfold?
If I could see what happened, step by step it could sure be useful. Seems to me
I remember someone showed how. 'set +x' isn't detailed enough.
Yes, I know that historically zsh was a design fix.It was in fact one of the primary reasons for the creation of zsh in the first place, to make the behavior of parameter expansions more consistent without always having to use double quotes around them.
setopt glob_subst
print -- ${~~asterisk}
does exactly that.
Cool. Manual mentions that, but now it makes sense.
Tx.