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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Top 10 most common hard skills listed on resumes...
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2024 15:46:02 +0200
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On 26/08/2024 02:48, Tim Rentsch wrote:

> It's been amusing reading a discussion of which languages are or are
> not high level, without anyone offering a definition of what the
> term means.

That is an important point.

>  Wikipedia says, roughly, that a high-level language is
> one that doesn't provide machine-level access (and IMO that is a
> reasonable characterization).

No, that's not what Wikipedia says.  To get the full picture, read the 
links:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-level_programming_language>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_programming_language>

Roughly speaking, they define a "high-level language" as one with a 
strong abstraction from the underlying machine, while a "low-level 
language" has little or no abstraction.

Wikipedia classifies C as a high-level language that also supports a 
degree of low-level programming, which I think is a fair assessment.

>  Of course no distinction along these
> lines is black and white - almost all languages have a loophole or
> two - but I expect there is general agreement about which languages
> clearly fail that test.  

Agreed - trying to make such binary classifications is usually a bad idea.

> In particular, any language that offers
> easy access to raw memory addresses (and both C and C++ certainly
> do), is not a high-level language in the Wikipedia sense.
> 

That is simply incorrect, based on the Wikipedia articles.

I think it is perhaps better to first talk about low-level and 
high-level coding or functionality, rather than the language. 
High-level coding deals with abstractions, defined by their 
specifications rather than the hardware (or virtual machine) running the 
code.  Low-level coding is tightly tied to the hardware - access to 
arbitrary memory (subject to OS or hardware restrictions), features 
based on the instruction set of the computer, and so on.

C clearly supports high-level programming - you can write very portable 
code that is independent from the underlying hardware.  (Most C 
/programs/ require a least a small amount of implementation-dependent 
behaviour or external library code, but a lot of C /code/ does not.)  It 
also clearly supports low-level programming.

Whether a programming language is considered "high level" or "low level" 
is, IME, determined by one question - is the language mainly defined in 
terms of abstract specifications or by the hardware implementing it?  C 
does have implementation-specific behaviour, and is thus not "pure" 
high-level language, but there can be no doubt that it is primarily 
defined as a high-level language.

Both C and C++ also /support/ a limited (but very useful in practice) 
subset of low-level programming.  That does not make them low-level 
programming languages, any more than C++ is a functional programming 
language just because it has lambdas.  And even if one were to classify 
them as low-level languages, it would not stop them /also/ being 
high-level languages.

And note that Wikipedia classifies it as a high-level language, and 
lists it along with other high-level languages.  (I don't consider 
Wikipedia to be authoritative, but it's usually a reasonable and 
objective source for many purposes.)

> 
> Third amusement:  any language that has not yet become popular
> has already failed to become popular.

Or it could be a new language that is gaining traction.