[texhax] How to write straight accents in TeX (not LaTeX!)

[Karl Berry]

    much less
    dangerous in context to insert plain tex code than it is in latex.

FWIW, that's not my experience.  context and latex seem more or less
equally far away from plain -- lots of things work, some things don't,
and very little is "officially" supported.

I think the philosophies of context and latex are pretty similar too:
lots of logical stuff, some physical stuff.

A colleague mentioned CTAN:macros/latex209/contrib/misc/isolatin1.sty to
me, which despite being in the latex209 tree has almost nothing
latex-specific (at a glance, just the trivial \@ifundefined).  It is the
same boring list of 8-bit chars being mapped to commands ...

Happy encoding,
karl