Why c is not high levl language?

Answer 1

Heh -- this answer requires perspective. Here's some history: 1st Generation language: Machine code -- all hexadecimal. Doesn't really allow for macors or subroutining. Machine specific. 2nd Generation Language: Assemblers. Commands on mnemonics, first with a 1:1 relationship with machine code commands, but later with extended commands, subroutine calls, macros. I could for example enter a single command to pass a bit stream to the print buffer. In Assembler, 1 command; in machine code many. Because all this translated to Machine Code, you could edit your program in machine or assembly. Still machine-dependent. 3rd Generation Languages. COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, etc. The languages were intended to read like common English (if your reader was a very stranger person), so commands went away from 3 character mnemonics (LCC for Load and Clear Core) to PRINT. Adding two numbers togehter and leaving the result in a thrid variable takes about 10 or so assembler commands, maybe 50 machine commands, and one COBOL Comannd "add A to B giving C.". Strong emphasis on modular coding, subroutining, functions, object oriented programming (at least as a buzzword). Admiral Grace Hopper declares, "If you do work for the US Department of Defense, your company WILL use COBOL internally!", thus reducing the literally thousands of languages in use back down to a handleful. 3GLs are NOT machine dependent (well, we hoped they weren't), so theoretically, if I wrote a FORTRAN program on a Hewlett Packard system, and kept it to ANSI spec, it'd run on an IBM system and so on. 4th Generation Languages. These were a lot like 3GLs but, where 3GL's contained only rudimentary I/O functionality, especially in the area of magnetic and especially direct access based files. 4GL's not only sovled this, but inherently incorporated "Data Base" handling -- organized data structures, often metaphorically geometric in format, with tools to facilitate the access and management of that DataBase. dBase was an example of this as was IBM's IMS. 5th Generation Languages are arguable -- they may not exist. If they do, they encorporate (well -- require actually) tools that allow for (and demand) adherence to the User Interface specs of the day. So Visual Basic allowed you to write Windows code that would (usually) produce MS Standard Windows looking programs, and allow for easy interface to all Windows subroutines and such -- -something that weas a royal pain to do manually. Earlier versions of 5GL's sacrificed some of the Database Management capability of the 4GL's and the flexibility of manually accessing DB's that 3GL's gave you. From here, language structure and definition left the path of "Generations" and kinda spread out, partially to include HTML (HyperText Markup Language -- never really intended to be a programming languge). Questions are raised daily about what we gain in overall unity and ease of program creation on the one hand, and what we lose in terms of specificity. It's said that, in a good 5GL, you can do 85 percent of the project in a week, 10 percent more in a year, and the remaining 5 percent sometime before the product goes obsolete. "C", originally developed around the UNIX operating system, started life as a strong 3GL. However, modern additions and changes could conceivabley qualify it for 4GL or 5GL status -- or even something more. By my (paleolithic) definition, C is a high level language solely because it is not machine dependent. So -- according to me - it IS high level. Heh -- this answer requires perspective. Here's some history: 1st Generation language: Machine code -- all hexadecimal. Doesn't really allow for macors or subroutining. Machine specific. 2nd Generation Language: Assemblers. Commands on mnemonics, first with a 1:1 relationship with machine code commands, but later with extended commands, subroutine calls, macros. I could for example enter a single command to pass a bit stream to the print buffer. In Assembler, 1 command; in machine code many. Because all this translated to Machine Code, you could edit your program in machine or assembly. Still machine-dependent. 3rd Generation Languages. COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, etc. The languages were intended to read like common English (if your reader was a very stranger person), so commands went away from 3 character mnemonics (LCC for Load and Clear Core) to PRINT. Adding two numbers togehter and leaving the result in a thrid variable takes about 10 or so assembler commands, maybe 50 machine commands, and one COBOL Comannd "add A to B giving C.". Strong emphasis on modular coding, subroutining, functions, object oriented programming (at least as a buzzword). Admiral Grace Hopper declares, "If you do work for the US Department of Defense, your company WILL use COBOL internally!", thus reducing the literally thousands of languages in use back down to a handleful. 3GLs are NOT machine dependent (well, we hoped they weren't), so theoretically, if I wrote a FORTRAN program on a Hewlett Packard system, and kept it to ANSI spec, it'd run on an IBM system and so on. 4th Generation Languages. These were a lot like 3GLs but, where 3GL's contained only rudimentary I/O functionality, especially in the area of magnetic and especially direct access based files. 4GL's not only sovled this, but inherently incorporated "Data Base" handling -- organized data structures, often metaphorically geometric in format, with tools to facilitate the access and management of that DataBase. dBase was an example of this as was IBM's IMS. 5th Generation Languages are arguable -- they may not exist. If they do, they encorporate (well -- require actually) tools that allow for (and demand) adherence to the User Interface specs of the day. So Visual Basic allowed you to write Windows code that would (usually) produce MS Standard Windows looking programs, and allow for easy interface to all Windows subroutines and such -- -something that weas a royal pain to do manually. Earlier versions of 5GL's sacrificed some of the Database Management capability of the 4GL's and the flexibility of manually accessing DB's that 3GL's gave you. From here, language structure and definition left the path of "Generations" and kinda spread out, partially to include HTML (HyperText Markup Language -- never really intended to be a programming languge). Questions are raised daily about what we gain in overall unity and ease of program creation on the one hand, and what we lose in terms of specificity. It's said that, in a good 5GL, you can do 85 percent of the project in a week, 10 percent more in a year, and the remaining 5 percent sometime before the product goes obsolete. "C", originally developed around the UNIX operating system, started life as a strong 3GL. However, modern additions and changes could conceivabley qualify it for 4GL or 5GL status -- or even something more. By my (paleolithic) definition, C is a high level language solely because it is not machine dependent. So -- according to me - it IS high level.