displaying 8bit characters octal sequences

[Roland Winkler]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> On 2 Jul 1999, Roland Winkler wrote:
> > My default setting for editing files is unibyte with
> > iso-latin-1. What should I do if in certain buffers I want
> > everything beyond 7bit asci to be displayed with the
> > corresponding octal number?
> 
> Try this:
> 
>  M-: (standard-display-default 128 255) RET

The above is from five years ago. It worked fine up to emacs 21.2.1
(as far as I can go back). Now I am using emacs 21.3.1 or CVS emacs.
and it doesn't work for me anymore.

To be more specific: Say, I start a fresh emacs --no-init-file.
Then I load a file that contains some german umlaute (iso-8859-1).
Then I do
 M-: (standard-display-default 128 255) RET

When I do all this with emacs 21.2.1 I see the octal sequences as
expected. When I do all this with emacs 21.3.1 or CVS emacs, the
umlaute are still displayed as umlaute.

The problem is not restricted to CVS emacs, but Eli Zaretskii
suggested that I should post it here.

Roland