That's a nifty idea!

Maybe without lower scale and with the semicolon:

  = () { bc -l <<< "$*"; }

"Stealing" the equals sign for this purpose feels a bit risky, but maybe it isn't.

I'd guess that xorcist added a space at the end of the function name because zsh uses =( to specify one type of process substitution. Without the space or an escape for = zsh will error on alpaca128's definition believing you wanted something else entirely.

To that point zsh has some excellent additions for process substitution beyond bash's <(list), but it also makes for yet more weird incompatibilities for when that matters. I only looked at this to start with because I assumed the space was because =() would have been treated as the full path modifier for a command called (), because it would mean that with any other character including other bracket types. TIL.

> Just a little shortcut but REPLs like Python's take a while to spin up, so it's pretty convenient.

Really? Loading python takes basically 0 seconds for me... the slowest I could get running `time python3` and hitting ctrl-d (to exit) is like 0m0.104s.

python comes up in way less than a second on my old mac air?