[MuffinCups]

C is the thin wrapper of people talk around machine talk. It's the primary interface between man and microprocessor. FFI is a pretty good convention for giving your latest, redundant, unnecessary, vanity language the capability talk to the OS which is almost universally written in C.

[pornel]

C is defined in terms of its own abstract machine (one that can't overflow a signed int), not the hardware that it runs on.

This creates the contentious issue of Undefined Behavior that C forbids, but which the actual hardware has no problems with.

[mytailorisrich]

It's because in practice this "abstract machine" means "whatever your CPU is" and "undefined behaviour" means "whatever your CPU does"...

[notepad0x90]

You can write programs without so much as even using the concept of functions. there are single-program embedded devices that don't have an OS. how can you look at something ada for example and say it is a wrapper around C?

C does have rules that must be obeyed and string concepts of data types or lack thereof (like not having a string). There are assembly language designs specific to C++, until recently arm had java byte code specific feature set (Jazelle). C is dominant but I'd hesitate to say it is a machine code wrapper.