Subject: Re: bug#43632: Raw bytes printed as latin-1 in echo area and *Messages*

From: Mattias Engdegård <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 2020 18:53:39 +0200

26 sep. 2020 kl. 18.10 skrev Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>:

> We were talking about M-:.

Sorry, typo of mine. Thanks for the correction.

>  And that does call prin1.  And prin1 does
> produce a unibyte string, the reason for the display that confused you
> is elsewhere.

We probably disagree about the details here, but let's leave prin1 aside; it doesn't need to be changed in order to improve the M-: user experience.
What about this little tweak?

--- a/lisp/simple.el
+++ b/lisp/simple.el
@@ -1797,6 +1797,7 @@ eval-expression
   (let ((print-length (unless no-truncate eval-expression-print-length))
         (print-level  (unless no-truncate eval-expression-print-level))
         (eval-expression-print-maximum-character char-print-limit)
+        (print-escape-nonascii t)
         (deactivate-mark))
     (let ((out (if insert-value (current-buffer) t)))
       (prog1

That way, it works more like the other interactive Lisp evaluation commands in this particular respect.
Do you think a NEWS entry is called for?