[geeks] Go Apple....

[Tim H.]

On Sun, 28 Jul 2002 20:43:37 -0400
Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:

>   Further...I determine the "level" of a language as how different it
>   is
> from "average" assembly language

Yeah, I would eguate level to the size of the machine code chunks it is
made of, the larger the chunks, the farther the language is removed from
the actual hardware, the higher level it is, and java as a language
never even gets to machine code, it just gets to the level of
abstraction that is the VM.  

Of course in a low level language, the bigger the library of functions,
and the more the program consists of function calls, as opposed to naked
code, the higher level it is as well.  With the various toolkits abd
such C is no longer the low level language it was when it was born, and
in fact someone writing assembler with a good macroassembler develops
pretty high level assembler after a while.

  I think that any programming language gets "higher level" as it ages,
when I was a kid programming in basic I was calling subroutines that I
transported from program to program, in essence creating higher level
functions even in basic.

Tim