It's a bit different in Swift. Kotlin lets you omit the parentheses if the closure is the only argument to the function. Swift lefts you place the lambda outside of the parentheses if the closure is the last argument to the function. That lets you construct a much larger variety of control-structure-like HOFs. Event handlers, for example, often take a functional argument plus a bunch of other data.

No, it's the same in Kotlin, from the docs:

"There is a convention that if the last parameter to a function is a function, that parameter can be specified outside of the parentheses."

So you can have normal arguments and specify the last parameter outside like.

    val col = "A"
    val row = 3
    table.update(col, row) {
       it * 5
    }

You may have confused that with SAM-conversions (?), which are for java-interop: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/java-interop.html#sam-...

Cool. Learn something new every day. (I was confused because all the examples except for lock() are single-arg, and IntelliJ usually autocompletes with parentheses because there's often a non-functional overload.)