What is a list in Bash?

I have searched for a similar question here, but surprisingly could not find any.

In GNU bash, there is (a construct? a structure? a data type?) called “arrays“. Arrays are well documented in the bash documentation, so I think that I understand the basics.

But suddenly, in the documentation there also comes up the term “list”. For example, it is used when talking about filename expansion (emphasis is mine):

If one of these characters appears, then the word is regarded as a pattern, and replaced with an alphabetically sorted list of filenames matching the pattern (see Pattern Matching).

Therefore, I have three questions:

  1. What does “list” mean here?
  2. Is it used in the same meaning as in for loop description?
  3. I am somehow lost in a whitespace world in bash. If this “list” is a separate concept to arrays (as I think), is it treated specially when it comes to whitespaces and IFS, or in the same way as an array?

There is another use of the “list” term when talking about sequence of one or more pipelines, but I am aware that it most probably means a different kind of lists.

UPDATE

  1. Since I see that the way that this “list structure” works is very similar to how arrays work – what are the differences between them?

UPDATE 2

  1. What are the uses cases when “lists” are preferred over arrays? For example, let us compare. Let us create two files:$ touch file1.txt file2.txt

When it comes to lists, I can do the following:

$ A=*.txt ; echo $A
file1.txt file2.txt
$

And when it comes to arrays, I can do the following:

$ B=(*.txt) ; echo ${B[@]}
file1.txt file2.txt
$

While these two results are exactly the same, are there any cases when arrays and lists return different results?

UPDATE 3

I might have confuse something, because in the above example it seems to be a list “wrapped” in an array. I do not know whether it makes a difference.

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