But the text is not conceptually made of unicode code points. It's conceptually made of characters. Codepoints are basically ever only used for either a) low-l

But the text is not conceptually made of unicode code points. It's conceptually made of characters. Codepoints are basically ever only used for either a) low-level mucking around like normalization -- a fringe use b) a (in the general case) bad approximation to characters -- the normal use, which will produce bad results for various "atypical" cases Now, personally, I'd often rather muck around with bytes because frequently they are a more useful abstraction than codepoints and lots of in practice important text operations can be performed quite fine (and efficiently) on them, even if the text is full of non-ascii characters.