character literal question

[Iavor Diatchki]

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