Re: dumping disp-table

[Richard Stallman]

    In all the cases I can think of, it seems that disp-table.el
    gets loaded at startup.

That seems to be due to the following code:

(defun set-display-table-and-terminal-coding-system (language-name)
  "Set up the display table and terminal coding system for LANGUAGE-NAME."
  (let ((coding (get-language-info language-name 'unibyte-display)))
    (if coding
        (standard-display-european-internal)
;;; The next line is what does it.
      (standard-display-default (if (eq window-system 'pc) 128 160) 255)
      (aset standard-display-table 146 nil))
    (or (eq window-system 'pc)
      (set-terminal-coding-system coding))))

What is the purpose of that line?  We could easily rewrite
it not to use disp-table, but we should also explain the reason
why it does what it does.