Subject: Re: bug#31676: 27.0.50; More helpful error message for unescaped character literals

From: Noam Postavsky <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2019 07:43:47 -0400

Philipp Stephani <[email-masked]> writes:

>> > The function uses an uninterned variable, so it has to be in C. I think that's slightly better than interning the
>> > variable and having some Lisp function access it (the latter would have one additional internal symbol).

>> Why does it need an uninterned variable?
>
> It doesn't need to be uninterned, but it's cleaner that way because no
> other code can access the variable.
>
>>  And if it does, why cannot
>> it create a symbol that is not in obarray?
>
> That's what the patch does.

The patch uninterns a symbol after it's interned in the obarray.  I
think the question is, why put the symbol in the obarray in the first
place?  Just a C static variable would do (although this would require
an additional (trivial) C function, to use with record_unwind_protect
instead of specbind).  See for example Vloads_in_progress.