Just a quick reply. I will prepare an updated patch that includes a short description in NEWS (mainly an updated version of Lawrence's proposal) and a longer one with examples in README. Once it's ready (probably only tomorrow), I will check again here whether there are still questions not yet answered by the updated patch.

Afaik, Zsh intends to be compatible with the POSIX "set -e" specification. If that is indeed the case, then all the patches can be seen as bug fixes. So no Zsh doc changes are required (or at least not because of these patches). The patches also only affect corner cases, which are quite a bit more complicated than Daniel's examples. None of Daniel's examples are affected; they all keep behaving the same way.

Philippe