What makes a high level language? Is Assembly high level? In that case GCC would be a transpiler, not a compiler. What about C? If C is considered high level,

What makes a high level language? Is Assembly high level? In that case GCC would be a transpiler, not a compiler. What about C? If C is considered high level, the original C++ compiler would have to be considered a transpiler rather than a compiler. Same goes for Chicken Scheme, or any of the other compilers that target C. If we take the example even further, what about Fog Creek's Wasabi, which compiles to either PHP or VBScript? Or Ruby's compiler, which takes Ruby source and outputs very high level bytecode. I don't think there's much value in distinguishing 'transpilers' from compilers. It's still the exact same principles at play, no matter what your source or target languages are.