top | item 25272322

(no title)

agytvfr | 5 years ago

This is actually about high level languages like C, from the abstract:

>Note that, by this definition, assembly languages occupy a position intermediate between machine languages and compiled languages.

And:

> Thus, I take the point at issue to be: “To what extent is it desirable for the system programmer to specify machine details?”

Basically this is an article about the importance of machine independent languages, and not about using Python for your userland or something similar.

discuss

alexvoda|5 years ago

I find it very interesting how the very fuzzy high-low scale has changed over time. I believe at this point this scale is meaningless.

wassenaar10|5 years ago

It's more a matter of people misusing the terms than any sort of "scale" shifting. Officially, the term "low-level language" still only refers to programming languages whose structure corresponds directly to that of the intended an instruction set architecture, i.e. machine code and assembly languages. Everything else is a "high-level language", according to the academic definition. That includes C, C++, FORTRAN, COBOL, Java, Python, Typescript and Swift.

Of course, we all know that there's a pretty marked difference in programming in a language like C vs a language like Python, for example. So often people use "higher-level" or "lower-level" to express this comparison. I wouldn't even argue that those are bad terms to express that difference, but over time people have conflated "C is a lower-level language than Python" with "C is a low level language", which brings us to where we are now where "high-level language" and "low-level language" have, as you said, fuzzy definitions in colloquial usage.

smegcicle|5 years ago

The scale is useless because the center has moved over time?

It used to be less fuzzy (assembled -- compiled) and now has more components (dynamic typing, garbage collection), but I don't see how anyone could deduce that the scale is nolonger a meaningful high-level (:^o) classification of a language.

emteycz|5 years ago

I laugh at it the same way I laugh at the left-right political spectrum.