character literal question

Hello, Is there a reason why we have to escape the character ' (apostrophe) when used in a character literal? For example, we have to write '\'' instead of '''. (With syntax highlighting, the second is a lot better looking than the first.) It seems that in this case we do not need the escape because a literal contains exactly one character. If there is no good reason for having the scape, I think that we should remove this restriction in Haskell'. -Iavor