Re: evaluating numbers

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Nov 7, 2019, at 19:30, Stephen Berman <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 7 Nov 2019 19:20:23 +0900 Jean-Christophe Helary <address@hidden> 
> wrote:
> 
>>> On Nov 7, 2019, at 18:57, Stephen Berman <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Thu, 7 Nov 2019 18:43:40 +0900 Jean-Christophe Helary
>>> <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> A while ago the biggest number that evaluated to a character (that I could 
>>>> not
>>>> display) was 1114111 (evaluated to "?� ").
>>>> 
>>>> Now, I can only go up to 127 (#o177, #x7f, ?\C-?) and 128 evaluates to 
>>>> (#o200,
>>>> #x80) which looks like the ASCII character set, but I was under the 
>>>> impression
>>>> that Emacs had its own character set...
>>>> 
>>>> What's going on here ?
>>> 
>>> This:
>>> 
>>> eval-expression-print-maximum-character is a variable defined in 
>>> ‘simple.el’.
>>> Its value is 127
>>> 
>>>   You can customize this variable.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> This variable was introduced, or its default value was changed, in
>>> version 26.1 of Emacs.
>>>   Probably introduced at or before Emacs version 26.1.
>> 
>> Thank you very much.
>> 
>> What's the rationale behind this change ?
>> 
>> I find that's a bit silly to limit the character set range available with 
>> this
>> evaluation.
>> 
>> Anybody knows ?
> 
> I think the main rationale was that it could take a long time for Emacs
> to return the evaluation when the system had a lot of fonts installed,
> because Emacs would try them all to display the character.

Thank you for the explanation.

Wouldn't it be more logical to only try the font used in the buffer at stake 
and give a proper evaluation of the number ?

How do we expect people to understand that there is a limitation when they 
don't see anything above 127 ?


Jean-Christophe Helary
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http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune