Evaluating numbers and characters with M-: prints their value and additionally to that the octal, hexadecimal and character representation of the number if it's printable. I've checked its docstring and was surprised to read that the aforementioned behaviour should only happen when using a prefix argument of zero. This either means that the docstring should be updated to make clear that this behaviour also happens when using without any kind of prefix argument or the function should be changed to not display this information when used without any prefix argument. The same question applies to other functions making use of the internal `eval-expression-print-format' function that is responsible for returning the alternate representation of the number, such as `eval-defun-2' and `eval-last-sexp-print-value' in lisp-mode.el and a few more. In GNU Emacs 24.5.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.16.2) of 2015-04-20 on bitzer.hoetzel.info Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11701000 System Description: Arch Linux Configured using: `configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --libexecdir=/usr/lib --localstatedir=/var --with-x-toolkit=gtk3 --with-xft 'CFLAGS=-march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe -fstack-protector-strong --param=ssp-buffer-size=4' CPPFLAGS=-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 LDFLAGS=-Wl,-O1,--sort-common,--as-needed,-z,relro' Important settings: value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8 locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix Major mode: Lisp Interaction Minor modes in effect: tooltip-mode: t electric-indent-mode: t mouse-wheel-mode: t tool-bar-mode: t menu-bar-mode: t file-name-shadow-mode: t global-font-lock-mode: t font-lock-mode: t blink-cursor-mode: t auto-composition-mode: t auto-encryption-mode: t auto-compression-mode: t line-number-mode: t transient-mark-mode: t Recent messages: For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a. Load-path shadows: None found. Features: (shadow sort gnus-util mail-extr emacsbug message format-spec rfc822 mml easymenu mml-sec mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231 mailabbrev gmm-utils mailheader sendmail rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums mm-util help-fns mail-prsvr mail-utils time-date tooltip electric uniquify ediff-hook vc-hooks lisp-float-type mwheel x-win x-dnd tool-bar dnd fontset image regexp-opt fringe tabulated-list newcomment lisp-mode prog-mode register page menu-bar rfn-eshadow timer select scroll-bar mouse jit-lock font-lock syntax facemenu font-core frame cham georgian utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean japanese hebrew greek romanian slovak czech european ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help simple abbrev minibuffer nadvice loaddefs button faces cus-face macroexp files text-properties overlay sha1 md5 base64 format env code-pages mule custom widget hashtable-print-readable backquote make-network-process dbusbind gfilenotify dynamic-setting system-font-setting font-render-setting move-toolbar gtk x-toolkit x multi-tty emacs) Memory information: ((conses 16 70969 6814) (symbols 48 17559 0) (miscs 40 35 138) (strings 32 9041 4444) (string-bytes 1 248306) (vectors 16 8908) (vector-slots 8 383094 18351) (floats 8 63 183) (intervals 56 177 0) (buffers 960 11) (heap 1024 35456 945))