Apropos that (though a bit OT) : what exactly is the deal with unescaped parantheses in bash? They just seem to produce a syntax error no matter where I use th

Apropos that (though a bit OT) : what exactly is the deal with unescaped parantheses in bash? They just seem to produce a syntax error no matter where I use them. But if they have no purpose, then why not simply treat them as nonspecial characters? E.g. echo hello :-) ; is invalid syntax, even though it doesn't seem to cause any ambiguities with any other bash syntax features. Why not just allow this and treat it like echo "hello" ":-)"; ?