Re: documentation of integers, fixnums and bignums

[Paul Eggert]

Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > encode-char could potentially return a value that cannot be
> > represented as a fixnum.
> Can this still happen?  When?

When INDEX_TO_CODE_POINT returns a code point greater than most-positive-fixnum, 
which can happen (in theory, at least) on 32-bit platforms. Formerly, such a 
code point caused Emacs to return a negative fixnum or junk, depending on the 
code point. Now it causes Emacs to return an integer with the proper value.

I don't know of any charsets that actually do that. Possibly Emacs should simply 
report an error if it runs across one, as that would simplify the code point 
processing internals.