Re: String syntax ambiguity

[Richard Stallman]

    Why is it a problem that two different strings have the same printed
    representation?

Because when you read them back, the distinction is not preserved.
You can't print them both and read them both and get the objects
that you started with.

    Or perhaps I don't understand what do you mean by ``printed
    representation''?

The printed representation of an object is the sequence of characters
output by prin1 or princ.

    If you mean the introduction of the eight-bit-* character sets, I think you
    are right.  However, these characters are not unibyte, they are multibyte
    characters whose internal representation is never exposed to the Lisp
    code.

I know that.

      That is, \200 to \377 don't appear in multibyte string, we just
    pretend they do.

Viewed at the Lisp level, these characters really do appear in the
string.  An element of the string would be 0200.  The internal
representation is different, indeed.