why is it only today I now understand that 1) bash functions can be *pasted* in to a session 2) they run with 'fun arg' and 3) are the same as C/R syntax with {} and ; for lines, or just newlines

fun() { local a="$1"; echo "$a"; }
fun abc
abc

I have a colleague who gave this talk once but I was distracted on some spatial code or whatever and I totally vagued on all of it. Now I need that Evi Nemeth wonderful book, those chapters on python and perl are fantastic ...