Exactly.  My favourite ML-style language is Haskell, and there we almost never want to call a function with the unit-tuple as an argument.<p>Haskell does differentiate between IO-actions and functions.  Here is an example:<p><pre><code>    main = do
      let printFive = print 5
      print 1
      printFive
      print 6
      printFive
</code></pre>
Will print<p><pre><code>    1
    5
    6
    5
</code></pre>
The type systems helps enormously keeping things straight here, but the basic concept would work in a non-statically typed language, too.