Old jokes aside, there are people who have seriously argued that C is, in important regards, a low-level language (though once it got ported off of DEC hardware, that claim got seriously weakened); but as an Algol-family language, the aspects of it that are relevant to this poll are the ones that it shares with other high-level languages. So I wanted to head off wise-asses who might otherwise be inclined to list C as low-level when filling in their answers here.
Making someone smile or growl at my phrasing was merely a pleasant side effect. [attempted innocent look]
I consider C a low-level language. I came at programming from the top-down. Anything which makes me aware of the actual metal and sand is "low-level" in my book.
Actually, at this point I *don't* really consider C to be "high-level". It's not assembler, to be sure, but it's a *big* step down from genuinely high-level languages like Haskell or anything in the ML family. Indeed, it's a pretty huge step down from even C# or Java.
C lives in the borderlands, IMO. It's high-level syntax, but it intentionally exposes a huge amount of the underlying guts of the machine so that you can fiddle with them. I'd say it's about equidistant between a good assembler and ML. So I do think the ambiguity is real...
Since I live in Macro-Land, I consider C to be quite low-level ("Pointers?! You mean to memory?!?!"). I understand the ambiguity -- I date a mainframe coder who speaks-to-metal. :)
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Making someone smile or growl at my phrasing was merely a pleasant side effect. [attempted innocent look]
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C lives in the borderlands, IMO. It's high-level syntax, but it intentionally exposes a huge amount of the underlying guts of the machine so that you can fiddle with them. I'd say it's about equidistant between a good assembler and ML. So I do think the ambiguity is real...
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