[syncopate]

It should be noted that on the official llvm irc channel (#[e-mail]) people do not like llvm's IR being called a "progamming language". Rather it's intended to be a representation of llvm's internal data structures. It may look similar to a programming language for sure but it's not the intent behind it. It's a representation that should help compiler engineers debugging their llvm-using parsers.

Also, if you've ever looked at clang's "-emit-llvm" output you will notice that there are some parts of the IR which are hard to be generated by humans, e.g. dgb by sequential number references.

See e.g.: http://llvm.org/docs/SourceLevelDebugging.html#object-lifeti...

[0x09]

To be fair to outsiders, http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html is linked from the main page where the human-readable IR format is referred to as "LLVM assembly language", and with the in-memory representation listed as an equivalent form but not with particular privilege.