Re: Wide strings

[Mike Gran]

Hi,

Let's say that one possible goal is to add wide strings 
* using Gnulib functions 
* with minimal changes to the public Guile API 
* where chars become 4-byte codepoints and strings are internally 
 either UTF-32 or ISO-8859-1

Since I need this functionality taken care of, and since I have some
time to play with it, what's the procedure here? Should I mock
something up and submit it as a patch?  If I did, it would likely be 
a big patch.  Do we need to talk more about what needs to be
accomplished?  Do we need a complete specification?  Do we need
a vote on if it is a good idea?

Pragmatically, I see that this can be broken up into three steps.
(Not for public use.  Just as a programming subtasks.)

1.  Convert the internal char and string representation to be 
explicitly ISO 8859-1.  Add the to/from locale conversion functionality
while still retaining 8-bit strings.  Replace C library funcs with 
Gnulib string funcs where appropriate.

2.  Convert the internal representation of chars to 4-byte 
codepoints, while still retaining 8-bit strings.

3.  Convert strings to be a union of 1 byte and 4 byte chars.

Thanks,

Mike Gran