[TimSAstro]

While I see what you're saying, I doubt you would claim to 'use' assembly when writing a C++ codebase - because (unless you're doing very low-level hand optimizations of the kind that get ever rarer), someone else has done the hard work of creating a compiler to do the translation for you. Same thing with NumPy et al, except one level higher up the abstraction stack.

[dekhn]

Actually, that's precisely what I do, except it's called machine language, not assembly. That is because assembly is an intermediate format above machine language (it's symbolic).