Note there is one possibly important difference; aliases are resolved before globbing.

Hm what's an example of where you might want to take advantage of that?

In practice

    alias 'lspy=ls *.py'

seems to be interchangeable with

    lspy() {
      ls *.py "$@"
    }

I have a semi-made desk calculator with prefix notation.

You can make it an alias of * , / etc, so ...

   $ * 4 6
   24
   $

It would keep it's own stack, but let a persistent process do the actual maths.

The persistent process could almost any repl of python, ruby etc.

Or use a 'real' calculator like Pike's ivy; https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Ivy

Unfortunately, ( is not a valid alias name, so lispy things are difficult.

[ is a valid function name tho so fun could be had there.

Also = is a valid function name.

So you could use = to start the calc, and use infix or postfix notation.

You can do some wild ~metaprogramming stuff with aliases.

Do you have examples of something neat?

It generates functions. Though not with a “$@“ at the end, so passing additional arguments at this moment is not supported. I also run a syntax check before the function is added to the file.

I've always just written that as \ls to call the non-alias

Won't work with functions, so be careful.

    $ function ls () {
    > echo denied
    > }
    $ ls
    denied
    $ \ls
    denied