expansion in conditional expression patterns

[Sebastian Stark <seb-zsh@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Consider this expression:

% if [[ 1 != <1-5> ]]; then print outside; fi
% if [[ 1 != <2-5> ]]; then print outside; fi
outside

But what if I want 5 to be a variable?

% limit=5
% if [[ 1 != <2-$limit> ]]; then print outside; fi
zsh: parse error: condition expected: 1

The manual:

 Normal shell expansion is performed on the  file,  string  and   
pattern
 arguments, but the result of each expansion is constrained to be a  
sin-
 gle word, similar to the effect of  double  quotes.   However,   
pattern
 metacharacters  are  active for the pattern arguments; the patterns  
are
 the same as those used for filename  generation,  see  zshexpn(1),   
but
 there  is  no  special  behaviour  of `/' nor initial dots, and no  
glob
 qualifiers are allowed.

What part of this do I misunderstand?

Thanks for help!


Sebastian