Code points are used in a multitude of formal information processing and telecommunication standards.
In character encoding code points usually represent a single grapheme—usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—but sometimes represent symbols, control characters, or formatting.
An abstract character is not a graphical glyph but a unit of textual data.
[7] If they added more bits per character to accommodate larger character sets, that design decision would also constitute an unacceptable waste of then-scarce computing resources for Latin script users (who constituted the vast majority of computer users at the time), since those extra bits would always be zeroed out for such users.
[8] The code point avoids this problem by breaking the old idea of a direct one-to-one correspondence between characters and particular sequences of bits.