Re: cut and paste hazard

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    It turned out that because the Spanish guy's name contained an
    accented character, Emacs interpreted the 8-bit code for that
    character as an editing command with the Meta key set.

Emacs running on a terminal interprets character codes 128-255
as meta keys; it always has.  Is there any way to distinguish
Latin-1 text from meta characters when using an xterm?

      If Emacs is running in an X window, it
    should accept 8-bit typein as normal text, and require actual meta key
    events to set off editing commands (I don't know if it does this).

Emacs already does this, when using its own window.