Re: display problem

[Richard Stallman]

    I think this way of merging a face and a character code in a single
    number is a kludge, a relic of an old era when Emacs didn't have any
    other way to put faces on the text, and we intended to remove this at
    some point.  Maybe Emacs 23 is that point.  We now have text
    properties and overlays, so we shouldn't be needing this.

I don't think so.  If the goal is to change the display of a
particular char code, doing that with overlays or text properties is
pretty painful.