Non-trivial usages of tikz foreach with a list of coordinates

When the TikZ parser (which is also used to parse the shift coordinate) finds something it doesn't understand, it usually tries to expand what's in front of it.

This is why

\fill \point circle (0.1); 

works without a hitch.

In case the user writes wrong syntax TikZ has a fail-safe as it decrements an internal counter and only tries the expansion tactic until this counter reaches 0. This counter start usually at 100 and gets decremted by 1 or 10 depending on the case.

At certain places, this counter is reset to 100, for example at the start of a path (which is why

\fill[shift=\point] (0,0) circle (0.1) ; 

works) or when the parser successfully finds a valid path specification. It does not get reset at the start of the picture or at the start of a scope. And since it is still the default and initialized-with 0 at that point, the parsing throws an error.

Using shift=(\point) works because there is another expansion of everything happening but it will lead to warnings of

Missing character: There is no ) in font nullfont! 

This is because it now tries to parse

((0,0))

and what happens is that the parser recognizes (0 as the x value for the coordinate and the second 0 as the y value. But it leaves the very last ) on the TeX input stream, similar as if you would have done:

\path; Foo \path; 

Now, why doesn't (0 raise any errors? As with many things in PGF/TikZ this will be fed to PGFmath and evaluated … and PGFmath doesn't have a problem with it. Try

\pgfmathparse{(((((1}\pgfmathresult 

or even

\pgfmathparse{1))))}\pgfmathresult 

Instead of using \expanded and \noexpand as suggested in the comments I'd recommend using the .expanded key handler which will instruct PGFkeys to expand the value before given it to the key.

(Or we patch either the scope environment or the shift key or just manually reset the counter but using the key handler works always in other places very well when TikZ does no expansion on its own.)

Code

\documentclass[tikz]{standalone} \begin{document} \begin{tikzpicture} \foreach \point in {(0,0),(0,2),(2,0),(2,2)} { \begin{scope}[shift/.expanded=\point] \fill (0,0) circle[radius=.1]; \end{scope} } \end{tikzpicture} \end{document}