Comment by mpweiher

> The "C is not a high level assembler" crowd, in my view, is making a category error, conflating C itself with an ISO standard and abstract machine concept coming decades later.

"C isn't not a high level assembler" captures it almost perfectly, and it also captures the documented intent of the people who created the ANSI C standard, which was that ANSI C should not preclude the (common) use of C as a high-level assembly language.

Here the quote:

C code can be non-portable. Although it strove to give programmers the opportunity to write truly portable programs, the C89 Committee did not want to force programmers into writing portably, to preclude the use of C as a “high-level assembler”: the ability to write machine- specific code is one of the strengths of C. It is this principle which largely motivates drawing the distinction between strictly conforming program and conforming program (§4).

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/C99RationaleV5.1...

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