I tend to think of this a bit differently, and would say that C is a low-level language, independent of implementation architecture, because it provides a small

I tend to think of this a bit differently, and would say that C is a low-level language, independent of implementation architecture, because it provides a small set of primitives with relatively simple behavior. Reason being, I don't see any fundamental difference between an x86 CPU that translates x86 instructions into simpler microinstructions for execution and a machine that translates, say, Haskell code into simpler microinstructions for execution, and I'd still consider Haskell a higher-level language than C.