preliminary patch for incorporating internationalizing facilities

[Kazuhiro Fujieda]

Hi, Chris.

I'm afraid to bother you. But I would like to know whether you
would check in the patch in a short time.  I'm sure it leads no
additional runtime cost in conversion from a string to a number
and cause no problem in the mount mechanism.
____
  | AIST      Kazuhiro Fujieda <fujieda@jaist.ac.jp>
  | HOKURIKU  School of Information Science
o_/ 1990      Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology