Extracting the 4th word of the first line in a file - is there a more elegant solution?

[Ronald Fischer <ynnor@mm.st>]

Within a script, I have need to store the 4th word in the first line of
a file.

Of course this is trivial to implement. However, I'm curious whether
there exists a better way to implement than what I found.

My current solution goes like this:

# $1 is the filename
line=$(head -n 1 $1)
field=${lin[(w)4]}

This is OK, but this needs an auxiliary variable 'line'. 


I could also do it like this:

field=$(head -n 1 $1|cut  -f 4 -d ' ')

No aux variable, but needs a pipe


So I wonder, whether there is a elegant "zsh" solution, which solves
this in a more elegant way?

Ronald
-- 
Ronald Fischer <ronaldf@eml.cc>
+  If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, 
+  and the bus is interrupted and the interrupt's not caught,
+  then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.
+		(cited after Peter van der Linden)