bug#4118: 23.1; eval-last-sexp-print-value is inconvenient

[Eli Barzilay]

On Aug 15, Juri Linkov wrote:
> >> The reason not to print the extra information on the first
> >> invocation of `eval-last-sexp' is the following.  Most often users
> >> want to see the integer result of the evaluated expression, but the
> >> extra information also contains a character representation of this
> >> integer that might print some unrelated character that might load
> >> some weird fonts the user doesn't want to load.
> >
> > In that case the obvious way to do this is to not print the
> > character form if it requires such a font.  If this is not easy to
> > do, then making it work only for ASCII seems better than the
> > current weird behavior.  (The reason I consider it weird is that I
> > managed to use Emacs for more than 15 years without noticing it.)
> 
> There is no way to guess whether the user want to see the character
> (however weird it is) or not.

The weird thing is not showing the character -- it is the fact that
the extra information is "sometimes there" -- it is the fact that the
behavior depends on whether the command was issued two times in a row.


> > The main point (IMO) of making it consistent is keyboard macros,
> > and in that case, if you want the character, then it's easy to
> > just wrap an (insert ...) around the expression.  Using it to
> > insert the character and then removing all the preceding text is
> > much more difficult for that.
> 
> Wrapping an (insert ...) around the expression is not as easy as
> typing `C-u C-x C-e', copying the character and undoing the change
> with C-/.

...and this is a good description for a solution: have it print out
the extra information only on something like an explicit positive
prefix argument (eg, C-u C-1 C-x C-e), and otherwise don't show it.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!