More string checkins

[Dan Sugalski]

Still in the pluggable_encodings branch, but more stuff's in.

The good news is that only 17 tests fail, 9 of them specifically in
the unicode string set. And since this nukes unicode (temporarily)
that's OK.

The bad news is that there are globals. Ick. That needs fixing.

If you want to fiddle, or look at what's going on, this wouldn't be a
bad time to do so. When this is finished I'm hoping to have working,
demonstrably good iso-8859-1, ascii, and binary character set
libraries and a working 8-bit fixed-width encoding library, suitable
for example code. We'll see if I get there.
--
Dan

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