need: scm_from_{utf8,latin1}_{string,symbol,keyword}

[Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>]

Hi,

In our C source, we have been trained to use scm_from_locale_string et
al. This is usually the right thing to do when interacting with the
operating system.

However, when we have literals in C source code, I think this strategy
is incorrect. I write my C source code in UTF-8 or in ISO-8859-1, but if
the user is running in another locale, they will not load my
strings/symbols/keywords correctly.

The solution is to use functions that specify the locale. We don't have
those yet, but we do have the capability to write them
now. Specifically:

  scm_from_utf8_string
  scm_from_utf8_symbol
  scm_from_utf8_keyword

  scm_from_latin1_string
  scm_from_latin1_symbol
  scm_from_latin1_keyword

We probably also need the "n" variants.

It's unlikely that you have a known utf-32 string as a char*, but we
should probably also provide scm_t_uint16* and scm_t_uint32* variants
for utf16 and utf32.

                               * * *

We also have the converse problem: since the easiest (and recommended)
way to get a char* from a Scheme string has been scm_to_locale_string,
in many cases we give external libraries locale-encoded strings instead
of the encoding they expect.

For example, most GLib-based libraries expect utf-8 strings, but
Guile-GNOME ignorantly passes them the result of calling
scm_to_locale_string. Though this will work in UTF-8 locales, it's only
by accident.

So then we need, I think:

  scm_to_utf8_string
  scm_to_utf16_string
  scm_to_utf32_string

We need the "n" variants here too (perhaps more).

What do people think? Any takers on implementing this? :)

Cheers,

Andy
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