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Comment by 0xDEEPFAC | Hacker News Reader

I second you and raise you Ada and C++. C is the furthest thing from a high-level programming languages there is...

Comparing scripting languages to compiled languages is apples and oranges. The advantage of scripting is supposed to be the convenience - not speed.

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> C is the furthest thing from a high-level programming languages there is

how times have changed

i think there needs to be a new set of terms. ah, that probably wouldn't help, because people would then mismatch eachother's idea of what terms mean and which set of terms correspond to which ideas. still, if people are calling c low level then what should assembly be called?

Imo the problem is that 'high' is a relative term. It's calibrated according to whatever the commonly used abstraction level is for the term-speaker.

The other problem is that level doesn't really mean anything, or it means something different in each language. Is it feature count? Abstraction potential? Memory-addressed vs objects? Statically or dynamically typed? Closeness of fit to the machine it's running on (imagine a lisp on a lisp machine, or x86 on an emulator - is that high or low level?)? Etc.

If "level" is ill-defined then low and high aren't relative terms, they're meaningless. But there is a lowest either way, the machine code. Then high level programming languages have the programmer writing code in a model independent of machine architecture. Those models are't one dimensional, so let's not bother trying to put them in order from low to high, let's talk about their features.

That's how i'd have it if it were for me to decide, but this isn't how language evolves.

No there doesn't. People need to respect the terms of the art.

Low-er? High and low are relative adjectives almost everywhere they're used. C is a low level programming language relative to most other programming languages; it has fewer layers of abstraction than say, Java. In a conversation discussing x86 assembly, LLVM IR, and C, then C would be high level. But that's usually not the conversation being had; there are a hundred times as many Java programmers as there are x86 assembly programmers.

We don't need a new set of terms. Relative terms are fine, they're just context sensitive.

assembly is 2nd generation. a higher level than machine code or manual switches.

Assembly was an alternate notation for machine code, but i understand nowadays that's a fiction.

I wouldn't mind categorizing "assembly language" differently from "programming language".

Yeah, i think that's fair.

> C is the furthest thing from a high-level programming languages there is...

C (especially C99 and up) is far, far higher level than something like FORTH.

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