Ah that’s your point. Yeah I agree that splitting literal a b c is convenient. It is surprising to many (like here) that this happens after variable substitution, and that’s not very convenient since you almost never want that. You could define this to happen the other way around, but then you’d obviously have to invent a new syntax for explicit splitting, which would be its own kind of annoying.

Edit: YSH (oil) does that btw. See here.