This is a feature that all shells with this style of compound assignment have in common. If no explicit subscripts are given, the text between the parentheses is processed exactly as though it were arguments to a command including brace expansion, word-splitting, and pathname expansion (and consequently, quoting is just as important). This is an important feature because it allows storing the results of a glob in an array easily.
If a subscript is given explicitly, then the right-hand side of the assignment is treated exactly as an ordinary scalar assignment would be, including all analagous behaviors for `+=' and the integer attribute. $ set -x; a=( [1]=* ) + a=([1]=*) -- Dan Douglas
