bug#4118: 23.1; eval-last-sexp-print-value is inconvenient

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

>> The reason not to print the extra information on the first
>> invocation of `eval-last-sexp' is the following.  Most often users
>> want to see the integer result of the evaluated expression, but the
>> extra information also contains a character representation of this
>> integer that might print some unrelated character that might load
>> some weird fonts the user doesn't want to load.
>
> In that case the obvious way to do this is to not print the character
> form if it requires such a font.  If this is not easy to do, then
> making it work only for ASCII seems better than the current weird
> behavior.  (The reason I consider it weird is that I managed to use
> Emacs for more than 15 years without noticing it.)

There is no way to guess whether the user want to see the character
(however weird it is) or not.

> The main point (IMO) of making it consistent is keyboard macros, and
> in that case, if you want the character, then it's easy to just wrap
> an (insert ...) around the expression.  Using it to insert the
> character and then removing all the preceding text is much more
> difficult for that.

Wrapping an (insert ...) around the expression is not as easy as typing
`C-u C-x C-e', copying the character and undoing the change with C-/.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/