NOSHWORDSPLIT problem??

[gak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Greg Klanderman)]

Hi,

I've been trying to wean myself from using double quotes around
everything since my understanding was that with SHWORDSPLIT unset this
was no longer needed.  However, there does seem to be a case when you
still get screwed, and I'm wondering if that is intentional or a bug
in zsh.  You still run into trouble if you have a variable containing
the empty string.

First some preliminaries:

phl% /bin/zsh-4.0.6 -f
phl% 
phl% echo $ZSH_VERSION
4.0.6
phl% unsetopt shwordsplit
phl% function count () { echo $# }
phl% 
phl% w="foo"
phl% x="bar baz"
phl% y=" space-on-either-end "
phl% z=""

When $z is not enclosed in double quotes, the empty string does not
make it into the array a:

phl% a=( $w $x $y $z )
phl% echo $#a
3
phl% count $a[@]                                
3
phl% for v in $a[@] ; do echo "v= \"$v\"" ; done
v= "foo"
v= "bar baz"
v= " space-on-either-end "

If $z is enclosed in double quotes, the empty string does make it into
the array a, but I further need to enclose expansions of the form
$a[@] in double quotes to have it not be elided:

phl% a=( $w $x $y "$z" )
phl% echo $#a                                   
4
phl% count $a[@]                                
3
phl% for v in $a[@] ; do echo "v= \"$v\"" ; done
v= "foo"
v= "bar baz"
v= " space-on-either-end "
phl% for v in "$a[@]" ; do echo "v= \"$v\"" ; done
v= "foo"
v= "bar baz"
v= " space-on-either-end "
v= ""

This seems pretty broken to me, because I still need to use all those
silly double quotes that NOSHWORDSPLIT is supposed to avoid.

thanks,
Greg