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.