> What does that mean? It means that C is a high-level language. For this specific example, isn't the reasoning backwards? The machine instruction is clearly t

> What does that mean? It means that C is a high-level language. For this specific example, isn't the reasoning backwards? The machine instruction is clearly the "high level" here, if you disregard the fact that it is, in fact, a machine instruction, thus there can be no "lower level" (ignoring microcode, an implementation detail). Of course, you cannot say that, in general, C is lower level than X64 assembly. However, just to illustrate, replace the popcntq instruction with some Scheme function, and try arguing that it is at a "lower" level. The argument won't work. In fact, people would think you were talking about a "decompiler", instead.