> But that's unwanted, as those backslashes show up in GHC(i) messages.
> So: how do I get haddock to not parse my '<^>' operator as a link/URL?

Hm, strange, technically we parse identifiers first and links second so
this should work without a problem unless Haddock doesn't recognise it
as an identifier.

I actually now notice in the parser that we don't consider ^ to be a
valid symbol so that's probably the culprit! Good catch, if that's
actually the case here then you can expect it to be fixed in the next
release, perhaps with 7.8.3 or something. Unfortunately the way we do
identifier parsing now is that we slurp everything that looks like a
valid identifier and afterwards we ask GHC to actually tell us if it's
it's something we know about. It seems like a bug caused by me not being
careful when reading the relevant part of the report, deepest apologies!
I do wish we had a better way of parsing these identifiers but I can't
think of one.