Stefan Monnier writes:

 > Indeed XEmacs does not represent chars as integers, and that can
 > eliminate several sources of problems.  Note that this problem is new in
 > Emacs-23, since in Emacs-22 (and in XEmacs, IIUC), there was no
 > character whose integer value was between 127 and 256, so there was no
 > ambiguity.

In XEmacs:

(char-int-p 241) => t
(int-char 241) => ?ñ

No problems with this that I can recall, except a few people with code
that did

    (set-face-font 'default "-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-2")