No, the parsing is all done first: "{ ... } always { ... }" is a full
_expression_.
Zsh "knows" the always-part is coming before it even
starts executing the first block.
So that's multi-pass parsing. Anyway, first I've seen of anything like it. I'm reading up on it right now. 'always' is a reserved word then. Bottom line is that I now have a tool for handling 'no files' situations. Good to know because there could be any number of housekeeping functions that might want to clean up or rename some group of files if they exist but it's not a problem if they don't.