No function escape processing?

Is it intentional that the driver (7.3.4) doesn't do function escape
processing?

Eg:

select * from mytable where {fn left(col_1, 1)} between 'A' and 'F'

results in:

java.sql.SQLException: ERROR: parser: parse error at or near "{"
at org.postgresql.core.QueryExecutor.execute(QueryExecutor.java:131)

It looks like AbstractJdbc1Statement.replaceProcessing(String p_sql) only
escapes time/date literals and passes everything else directly through.

Thanks,

- Jason Sando