Wide strings

[Mike Gran]

Hi.  I know there has been a lot of talk about wide characters and
Unicode over the years.  I'd like to see it happen because how the are
implemented will determine the future of a couple of my side-projects.
I could pitch in, if you needed some help.

I looked over the history of guile-devel, and there has been a
tremendous amount of discussion about it.  Also, the Schemes seem to
be each inventing their own solution.

Tom Lord's 2003 proposal
    http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2003-11/msg00036.html
Marius Vollmer's idea
    http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2005-08/msg00029.html
R6RS
    http://www.r6rs.org/final/html/r6rs-lib/r6rs-lib-Z-H-2.html#node_chap_1
MIT Scheme
    
http://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/documentation/mit-scheme-ref/Internal-Representation-of-Characters.html

There has also been some back-and-forth about to what extent the
internal representation of strings should be accessible, whether the
internal representation should be a vector or if it can be something
more efficient, and how not to completely break regular expressions.

Also, there is the question as to whether a wide character is a
codepoint or a grapheme.

Is there a current proposal on the table for how to reach this?

If you suffering from a dearth of opinions, I certainly have some
ideas.