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It's not too much of a stretch to look at just ' FIXME' as a very sophisticated macro assembler.

s/FIXME/Ruby, or Python, or Perl, or any other language. Where does one draw the line that distinguishes a language from a sophisticated enough assembler?

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Those are interpreters, not compilers.

If you're not comfortable with interpreted languages, substitute for Java, C++ or other compiled languages. My question still stands for itself.

No it doesn't.

In java any kind of minimal assignment can explode behind the scenes into a a whole pile of function calls, that would never happen in C, what you see is what you get.

It's interesting to compare the real difference here. In C, what you see at compile-time is what you get. As compared to an interpreted language where what you see at compile-time is probably going to be completely different from what happens at runtime. The difference is really where the optimizations occur. Runtime optimizations have certainly come a long way.

jasonwatkinspdx and hackermom have explained why your statement is highly inaccurate.

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