Feature Request: Multi-octet raw

It would be nice if Postgresql supported multi-octet raw data.  Certainly a 
lot of what you would do with it would be similar to bytea, but the basic 
string functions would be overloaded so that the unit of work would be a 
multi-octet word.  

Multi-octet instances could be cast to bytea when one wanted to work with the 
data bit-by-bit instead of word-by-word.

the declaration would be something like:

CREATE TABLE acme( ...  ,multi_octet_foo  MULTIOCTET (octets-per-word, max-words-per-column) ,...)

To reuse a declaration you could create a domain.


MULTIOCTET columns could be loaded using octal, decimal, or hexadecimal text 
input. 


The real advantage of a multi-octet type would be for power users.  The code 
would be reusable.  It would simplify tasks like creating the often requested 
native support for UTF-16 and the less frequently requested UTF-32.