multi-lingual support for Guile strings

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

What's happening here?

The "Guile ideas" page at the FSF says Torbjorn Gannholm is working on
it, but I don't think I've seen any mail on it.  (I'm a bit behind,
but I've skimmed the subject lines.)  Nor did I see an email address
there, hence my sending here.

This is sort of a significant issue in my dealing with Emacs Lisp
strings in my Guile-Emacs project (more info coming shortly).  If the
interfaces are planned out and expected to be reasonably stable, I
could throw together dummy versions for my own use now that only
handle plain ASCII text strings.  Maybe with a hack to use multiple
bytes for certain ASCII characters, just to intentionally break any
code that assumes only one byte per character...

Then when the real support is merged into Guile, I could use it, and
my Emacs hacking won't be held up much in the meantime.

There are other things I can work on in the meantime, but I don't
think I can switch to using Guile strings as Emacs strings without
this, at least not without a high probability of breaking the Emacs
multilingual support in some way that'll take forever to debug later.
And strings are kind of low-level; other stuff depends on them, so
they're fairly high on my priority list.

Ken