Shell argument splitting behaviour

[Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>]

I disovered this inconvenience in the parameter splitting flag (z) which
splits words in a similar way to how command line arguments are handled.

  foo="(one) (two) (three)"
  print -l ${(z)foo}

prints

  (
  one
  )
  (two)
  (three)

That's because the command word in the line is treated differently; in
this case, it looks like the start of a subshell.  I wasn't expecting it
when splitting a string, because it's just an arbitrary set of words,
and my first reaction was to change it (which is easy enough) but I
suppose you can think of it as a feature.  The same feature occurs when
the line editor splits arguments: in insert-last-word and
copy-prev-shell-word.  In those cases the current behaviour is right,
although it'll only rarely make a difference.

I thought I'd mention it in case anyone else had any reactions.

What I was trying to do was use this to get lisp-like lists of
arguments (since after the first word parentheses have to be balanced),
but I can get that to work just by putting a dummy word in front, so
it's actually not a major concern.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070