For me, it doesn't matter whether printf("hello\n") works via a call to printf or a call to puts. If those 6 characters I specified are written to standard outp

For me, it doesn't matter whether printf("hello\n") works via a call to printf or a call to puts. If those 6 characters I specified are written to standard output, I don't care how it was done. Of course I care if I want to use the value returned by printf, but if my code uses that value the optimization isn't performed. I think the semantic gap between assembly language and C is much wider than a lot of people realize. I wonder if a language somewhere in the middle of that gap would be useful to some people. (It probably wouldn't be useful to me.)