[gnulinux]

High level, low level formally refers to the level of abstraction of the virtual machine of the programming language with respect to the "target" model of computation. We say assemblers are "low level" since it adds very little abstraction to the von neumann machine it's intended to run on, on the other hand, python programs compile to a long set of instructions. One can formalize this concept using Kolmogorov complexity. (i.e. what's the size of smallest assembler program implementing python)