While you can certainly argue for (or against) any of the different globbing behaviors - ranging from "the shell"'s (interpret wildcards literally, if no match in the file system) to Python's (always test for existence) - ultimately, it's a matter of preference.

Personally, I find Perl's mixed behavior rather "do-what-I-mean".  I.e., when I specify a ? or * wildcard, I'm typically interested in what matching files there are in the file system, while if I use a "limited set" wildcard like {a,b,c}, I can compactly compute permutations with it, e.g. 

$ perl -le 'print for glob "{foo,bar}{baz,quux}"'
foobaz
fooquux
barbaz
barquux

[download]

which Python doesn't do because of its consistent behavior.  IOW, consistent isn't always the most practically useful... :)

And, as for the shell, I always found its behavior to treat a "*" literally (in case nothing matches) a little counter-intuitive... (if I really mean a literal "*", I can always escape it in Perl).

Anyhow, YMMV.

In reply to Re: a glob w/ no wildcards returns itself by Eliya
in thread a glob w/ no wildcards returns itself by jeberle

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