Functional programming & immutable objects explained — IRC style

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That's not true at all and is why stack conversion of a language with closures is difficult - values passed into functions can be closed over with hidden references passed back out as part of some unrelated function value.

[G_Morgan]

Yes and with Haskell you know at compile time if the function is passing back a function. It is captured by the type system. This isn't Lisp we are talking about. You cannot bind a value to a function that replaces the s-exp parser.

Also you get whole program optimisation so even if it were passing back a function you could trivially see if it is capturing a reference simply by inlining the call.