Re: is this a bug? string-equal seems to act strangely

[Chris Moore]

Kenichi Handa <address@hidden> writes:

> I don't remember why but the Lisp reader reads "\200" as a unibyte
> string but if \x notation appears in a string, it is read as a
> multibyte string.

Thanks.  I see that documented in (elisp) Non-ASCII in Strings:

      You can also represent a multibyte non-ASCII character with its
  character code: use a hex escape, `\xNNNNNNN', with as many digits
  as necessary.
  [...]
  using any hex escape in a string (even for an ASCII character)
  forces the string to be multibyte

Is there a good reason why using \xNN should cause the string to be
multibyte?  It seems counterintuitive to me.