Re: triviality regarding $# counts

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Sat, Apr 13, 2024 at 8:49 PM Lawrence Velázquez <larryv@zsh.org> wrote:
>
> In a sense, you've been using it all along.  Given an array "arr",
> $arr is the same as $arr[*] (by default), which is why double-quoting
> it produces a single word.

This puts me in mind of a couple of other details.

Because zsh does not split parameter expansions by default, $ary and
$ary[*] and $ary[@] are equivalent when not quoted, as Lawrence
demonstrated.

However, in all three of those cases, empty elements are typically
discarded, as they would be in a shell that defaults to splitting.
That's why "$ary[@]" is still useful:  It quotes each element
individually, so empty elements are preserved.

(Aside, in bash and ksh, $ary is equivalent to ${ary[0]}, not to
${ary[*]}.  A little oddly, this is also true for their associative
arrays, that is, the value for key 0 is used.)