bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91

[Drew Adams]

> > Please describe exactly what the reader does when it reads
> > one of those characters followed by Lisp-symbol syntax, in
> > both cases: char escaped and char not escaped.
> 
> How about this:
> 
>     ** To avoid confusion caused by "smart quotes", the reader signals an
>     error when reading Lisp symbols which begin with one of the following
>     quotation characters: ‘’‛“”‟〞＂＇.  A symbol beginning with such a
>     character can be written by escaping the quotation character with a
>     backslash.  For example:
> 
>         (read "‘smart") => Lisp error: (invalid-read-syntax "strange
> quote" "‘")
>         (read "\\‘smart") == (intern "‘smart")

Yes, that's clear (to me).  I would never have guessed that
the previous description meant that.

But may I ask why such "strange quote" characters are not
taken as lisp-symbol constituent characters?  Why the need
to escape them?  Why are they treated specially?

That description describes a workaround "to avoid confusion",
but it's not clear why we need "to avoid confusion".  What
good is the error behavior in the first place?  If such chars
are not to be treated as normal symbol chars it should be
because they have some special treatment/behavior/interpretation
for Lisp, no?  If the only non-escaped behavior is to raise an
error then that just sounds like a bug, to me.

I'm probably missing something important, but whatever that
is it does not seem to be conveyed by the NEWS description.
At all.