character syntax

[Ian Zimmerman]

I am new to the language (coming from ML) and I am sorry if my first
post turns out to be a flamebait, but I can't help it:

Why in the world did the designers of Haskell permit the ' character
to be both a prime (part of identifiers) and the single-character
quote?  Didn't they realize what they were doing to would-be
intelligent editors?  Or were they just a bunch of rabid ed users?

Has anyone found a way to deal with this in Emacs, _correctly_?  That
is, among other things, '(' should be ignored for sexp parsing...

-- 
Ian Zimmerman, Oakland, California, U.S.A.
GPG: 433BA087  9C0F 194F 203A 63F7 B1B8  6E5A 8CA3 27DB 433B A087
The world has taken on a thickness of vulgarity that raises
a spiritual man's contempt to the violence of a passion.  Baudelaire