Yep, this is a linguistic problem, not a technical one. "C is not a low level language" implies that the hi/lo boundary lies below C. What's below C? IR, Asm, a

Yep, this is a linguistic problem, not a technical one. "C is not a low level language" implies that the hi/lo boundary lies below C. What's below C? IR, Asm, and opcodes. IRs like LLVMIR and various bytecodes. Well, those don't map to the hardware 1:1, not even close. So IR must be HLL. Sure Asm has to be architecture specific, but even then we are getting pretty good at transpilation. And those codes get translated to opcodes anyways on most modern chips. Basically, unless you are assembling on an ancient system or embedded processor, you aren't writing in a "low level language". Very few folks nowadays do this, so the term "LLL" doesn't occupy much mindshare in semantic space. That leads folks to populate it with what they perceive as low level - the lowest language on the abstraction tree they are likely to encounter - C. This divide is only going to expand so I say we just accept the definition of low level language has shifted, and call anything where it does closely match... something else, I don't have a good term. Maybe "hardware level language".