Yes, and that's my reaction too. While I can see the rationale for always starting another process, in practice I haven't found the leakage to be a big problem

Yes, and that's my reaction too. While I can see the rationale for always starting another process, in practice I haven't found the leakage to be a big problem. Actually Oil functions don't use dynamic scope, but this is done in-process, not with another process: https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/variables.html#procs-dont-use-dynamic-scope https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/variables.html#p... ---- Also nested functions don't really add much useful to shell. It's purely a matter of textual code organization and doesn't affect the semantics. I define all functions at the top level.