Subject: Re: bug#44155: Print integers as characters

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2020 21:53:53 +0200

> From: Juri Linkov <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked],  [email-masked]
> Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2020 21:09:07 +0200
> 
> > And, btw, why not allow raw bytes here as well? is there some problem?
> 
> Because of ambiguity, both these return the same value:
> 
> (read (concat "?" (string 128)))     => 128
> (read (concat "?" (string 4194176))) => 128

And why is that a problem?

Alternatively, we could print raw bytes in some special way.  But not
treating them as characters sounds some subtlety that will be hard to
explain.