Just like diamonds are no longer at the top of the mohs scale. C is no longer anywhere near the top of "high" in "High level" languages.
Just like diamonds are no longer at the top of the mohs scale. C is no longer anywhere near the top of "high" in "High level" languages.
Langauge itself is a highly variable thing. People can understand something completely different from what the originator intended, but it doesn't change what said originator meant by it. People can always say "oh C is not a high level language because I think that a low level language should be X and Y" the same way they can say "oh men have to have a beard and know how to fight to be be real men", but in reality men - beards or not - are still fundamentally men.
Besides, why die on this hill? So everybody suddenly concedes that, fine, C is a "high level language". Is anybody's opinions going to be changed? No.
So, how about we stick to useful definitions, and agree that in modern times C is a low-level language, and, likewise, understand that agreeing to that isn't going to change one letter of the C specification or remove one line of C's libraries or anything else?
There's no gain to be had by anyone in this silly line of argument.
The point I want to get across is that for you C is a low level language. To the guy programming a fancy toaster in whatever version of an Assembly language C is a high level language. To be anally retentive and follow your comment about the ranking of languages, if I follow that logic then the only two low level languages would be C, Assembly, and perhaps a compiler complier circa the early 70's that whose name I cant remember. The difference between Assembler and C is extremely jarring in comparison to the difference between C and Javascript (for example).
One thing to note is that C is used a lot for low level systems programming and because of it it's so commonly described as a low level programming language. That said, writing low level systems programs does not mean that we're exclusively using a low level language to do so.