[dathinab]

The full quote is:

> Although it strove to give programmers the opportunity to write truly portable programs, the C89 Committee did not want to force programmers into writing portably, to preclude the use of C as a “high-level assembler:” the ability to write machine-specific code is one of the strengths of C. It is this principle which largely motivates drawing the distinction between strictly conforming program and conforming program (§4).

This doesn't say that C is a high-level assembly.

It just says that the committee doesn't (at that point in time) wants to force the usage of "portable" C as a mean to prevent the usage of C as high-level assembler. But just because some people use something as high level assembler doesn't mean it is high level assembly (like I did use a spoon as a fork once, it's still a spoon).

Furthermore the fact that they explicitly mention forcing portable C with the terms "to preclude" and not "to break compatibility" or similar I think says a lot about weather or not the committee thought of C as high level assembly.

Most importantly the quote is about the process of making the first C standard which had to make sure to ease the transition from various non standardized C dialects to "standard C" and I'm pretty sure that through the history there had been C dialects/compiler implementations which approached C as high level assembly, but C as in "standard C" is not that.

[mpweiher]

It specifically says that the use of C as a "portable assembler" is a use that the standards committee does not want to preclude.

Not sure how much clearer this can be.

[HeroicKatora]

That statement means the comittee does not want to stop it from being developed. The question is, has it? They mean a specific implementation could work as portable assembler, mirroring djb's request for an 'unsurprising' C compiler. Another interpretation would be in the context of CompCert, which has been developed to achieve semantic preservation between assembly and its source. Interestingly this of course hints at verifying an assembled snippet coming from some other source as well. Then that alternate source for the critical functions frees the rest of compiler internals from the problems of preserving constant-timeness and leakfreedom through their passes.

[mpweiher]

No.

C already existed prior to the ANSI standardization process, so there was nothing "to be developed", though a few changes were made to the language, in particular function prototypes.

C was being used in this fashion, and the ANSI standards committee made it clear that it wanted the standard to maintain that use-case.