Re: evaluating numbers

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2019 09:10:02 -0800
> 
> On 11/14/19 6:10 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >>      232 (#o350, #xe8, LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH GRAVE)
> >>      1114109 (#o4177775, #x10fffd, <Plane 16 Private Use>)
> > I don't think this is less confusing, and I'm not really interested in
> > opening that old debate again.  The train has left the station, so
> > people who are unhappy with the current defaults should customize the
> > option we provided back then.
> 
> Although I agree this topic has been discussed a lot, I wouldn't be so 
> hasty to reject Yuri's suggestion. I don't see how to customize Emacs so 
> that eval-expression outputs a string like "232 (#o350, #xe8, LATIN 
> SMALL LETTER E WITH GRAVE)". The behavior that Yuri's suggesting would 
> be more convenient to me than what Emacs currently does, as I often deal 
> with characters where it's more important to know the character's name 
> than what it looks like. I don't see the harm of adding this feature to 
> eval-expression by default, or at least as an option.

Sorry, I don't want to make user-visible enhancements in this feature
which has barely debuted.  I would like to collect more user input
first.

FWIW, my personal opinion is that it's jarring to see something like
"LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH GRAVE" when all I asked was to evaluate an
integer expression.  (Showing the corresponding character is also
jarring, but it's much less prominent, and it was there for a long
time.)  So the next we will hear is how to customize this not to show
the character's name, etc. etc.  Let's stop the feature creep right
here, even though it's tempting (it always is).