There's no ambiguity when you're using closures. Concerning partial function application, you need a special syntax anyway (unless you consider all functions to be curried by default). You don't do that to save keystrokes, you omit parenthesis because "All services offered by a module should be available through a uniform notation, which does not betray whether they are implemented through storage or through computation."

I used scala for a while, I admit there's a whole bunch of features that can get you confused. This takes 30s to spot.