Thank you Eliya. The use case I have is to do actual file matching, where the user specifies the pattern. For this, the behavior is counter-productive. Therefore:

$ perl -le 'print grep { -f } glob "foo.c"'
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will have to rule the day.

In bash you can do:

$ shopt -s nullglob
$ echo foo.?
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but then ls generates full dir listings on failed globs.