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by AdieuToLogic 172 days ago
> C was designed as a high level language and stayed so for decades

C was designed as a "high level language" relative to the assembly languages available at the time and effectively became a portable version of same in short order. This is quite different to other "high level languages" at the time, such as FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, etc.
1 comments
pjmlp 171 days ago
When C was invented, K&R C, it was hardly lower level than other systems programming languages that predated it, since JOVIAL in 1958.

It didn't not even had compiler intrisics, a concept introduced by ESPOL in 1961, allowing to program Burroughs systems without using an external Assembler.

K&R C was high level enough that many of the CPU features people think about nowadays when using compiler extensions, as they are not present in the ISO C standard, had to be written as external Assembly code, the support for inline Assembly came later.

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AdieuToLogic 171 days ago
I think we are largely saying the same thing, as described in the introduction of the K&R C book:

  C is a relatively "low level" language. This
  characterization is not pejorative; it simply means that C
  deals with the same sort of objects that most computers do,
  namely characters, numbers, and addresses.[0]
0 - https://dn710204.ca.archive.org/0/items/the-c-programming-la...
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