bug#44155: Print integers as characters

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Mattias Engdegård <mattiase@acm.org>
> Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2020 19:47:17 +0100
> Cc: juri@linkov.net, schwab@suse.de, 44155@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> > What is meant by "printable characters" here?  One could think you
> > mean [:print:], but that doesn't seem to be what then code does.
> 
> Non-control characters (characters other than control characters), in this 
> case. I wanted to keep things simple and not involve the Unicode database in 
> the printer.
> 
> (For that matter, [:print:] is a regexp feature and doesn't really define the 
> meaning of 'printable', but your question was valid.)
> 
> On the other hand, printing all non-controls using the ?X syntax is maybe not 
> ideal. Attached is a new patch that uses Unicode properties to select only 
> printable base characters.

Thanks, but my main question is still not answered.  I asked it from
the POV of documentation: we should provide a more specific
description of which characters will be printed as characters, so that
users are not surprised.  The text in NEWS still says "printable
characters" without defining that term, and so does the doc string of
print-integers-as-characters.

And now there's another question, which is what caused you to filter
characters like you did?  E.g., what's wrong with combining classes?
why not simply use graphicp?