Well from the pov of machine or assembly code, C is without a doubt a high level language. But at the same time it's the lowest-level high-level language (that

Well from the pov of machine or assembly code, C is without a doubt a high level language. But at the same time it's the lowest-level high-level language (that's popular at least). I'm also not aware of any high level programming languages that allow access to the CPUs status flags (for instance to check for overflow). (there are a couple of interesting 'mid-level' languages for 8-bit processors though, like Millfork: https://github.com/KarolS/millfork https://github.com/KarolS/millfork) I'd be all over a proper mid-level language that's closer to modern CPUs than C and has less 'optimization magic'. But this idea doesn't seem to be very popular amongst the compiler writer crowd.