Working on unix one eventually becomes intimately familiar with the $PATH.
In zsh, the $PATH variable is mirrored to a $path variable as an array.
Which to me, is nicer to work with and make more sense.
In addition with zsh one can keep only the first occurrence of duplicated values with typeset -U path. See man --pager='less -p "typeset -U"' zshbuiltins for more info.