RE: Differences between identical strings in Emacs lisp

["Jürgen Hartmann" <juergen_hartmann_@hotmail.com>]

@Stefan Monnier: Thank you for your clarification:

>> both evaluate to (186), indicating that the strings contain the same
>> character(s).  So they are identical.
>
> No: the "\xBA" string does not contain any character, it only contains
> bytes (we call such "string of bytes" a "unibyte string" and the usual
> "string of characters" is called a "multibyte string").

That's very important, in deed--according to the golden rule:
"Clarity of concept requires clarity of terms."

> And yes, the (integer) codes of the bytes of "\xBA" happen to be
> identical to the (integer) codes of the characters of (concat '(#xBA)).
>
> So (equal (append "\xBA" nil) (append "º" nil)) is non-nil.
> Note that the same applies to: (equal (append "\xBA" nil) (append [#xBA] nil))

I think my problem was that I have missed the type--unibyte vs. multibyte--of
my strings, the fact that characters and raw bytes are different things, and
that the (integer) codes of raw bytes gets converted between unibyte and
multibyte contexts. Because of the latter we have equality for example
between "\xBA" and (concat '(#x3FFFBA)):

   (string= "\xBA" (concat '(#x3FFFBA)))
   --> t

Again, thank you for your input.

Juergen