>  Do I understand correctly that non-starred arguments are packed into
>  intermediate tuples/sets in the presence of starred arguments so that
>  {a,b,*c,d,e} is equivalent to {*{a,b},*c,*{d,e}}? This should not be a
>  problem for tuples, but with sets, it means that {a,b,c} may behave
>  subtly differently from {a,*(b,c)}.

Can you show an example where this would be different?