Stefan Monnier via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of
text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:

> `prin1` will have its share of downsides, I guess, but when printing
> "arbitrary data", it's definitely a safer choice than `princ` which
> is rarely the right thing (except when printing strings, obviously).

I hope you only mean strings that contain the printed representation of
an object.  Our `pp--insert-lisp' prints strings in the argument with
`prin1' (of course).


> This said, I don't see the connection with printing small numbers as
> chars.

There is none - but we constantly keep replacing every single `princ'
with `prin1' in that function, one after the other, so I suggest to
switch to `prin1' for all objects and see if anything remains where
that behaves unintuitively.

> To print chars using the ELisp syntax you need `prin1-char`: AFAIK
> neither `prin1` nor `princ` work (at all).

Thanks for that comment - I updated the patch to use `prin1-char':