C is assembly on steroids which gives you just the essential features of an HLL, without any of the fancy stuff which would complicate the translation and would

C is assembly on steroids which gives you just the essential features of an HLL, without any of the fancy stuff which would complicate the translation and would potentially require a runtime environment. Any C construct/operation has a canonical representation as a short series of instructions found on most machines. Essentially, what you get is expression-oriented syntax (operations are expressions yielding a result), support for structured programming (loops, conditionals), automatic register allocation and stack frame management through named local variables, abstraction for calling conventions and a rudimentary type system around integers and pointers.