Comment by saidnooneever
2 days ago
glad you bring up context in this note. i find C high level too but u are right, in a comparisson you can still say its really low level.
C was coined originally as high level because the alternatives were things like assembler. a term rooted in comparisson more than anything.
Thanks, my parent’s comment is almost a thought-terminating cliche in this kind of discussion. However, Chisnall’s now classic ‘C is not a low level language’ article is one of my favorite papers on language theory and potential hardware design. A discussion about the shortcomings of viewing C as a low level language can/could be profitable, deep, and interesting; but context is king.