The sophistication of the compiler does not mean the language is high level. The meaning of a high level language is to do with abstraction away from the hardw

The sophistication of the compiler does not mean the language is high level. The meaning of a high level language is to do with abstraction away from the hardware. C programmers often wince at languages that are highly abstracted away from the hardware. But those are what are "high level" languages. Especially languages that remove more and more of the mechanical bookkeeping of computation. Such as garbage collection (aka automatic memory management). Strong typing or automatic typing. Dynamic arrays and other collection structures. Unlimited length integers and possibly even big-decimal numbers of unlimited precision in principle. Symbols. Pattern matching. Lambda functions. Closures. Immutable data. Object programming. Functional programming. And more. By comparison C looks pretty low level. Now I'm not knocking C. If there were a perfect language, everyone would already be using it. Consider the Functional vs Object debate. (Or vi vs emacs, tabs vs spaces, etc) But all these languages have a place, or they would not have a widespread following. They all must be doing something right for some type of problem. C is a low level language. And there is NOTHING wrong with that! It can be something to be proud of!