Ever wondered about docstrings containing backslash-escaped opening parentheses, but only for the ones at the left-most column? Wonder no more! As far as I can tell, this is the least offensive hack in syntax.c which contains the code for determining the class of glyphs by the means of a so-called syntax table in a piece of code (such as comment, string, symbol, etc.) and are required for both correct movement (like, movement by defun) and as basis for sufficiently fast syntax highlighting. It shouldn’t be surprising that these mechanisms only work out reasonably well for C and Lisp, but that’s a topic for a different post.