Question

In informatics theory I hear and read about high-level and low-level languages all time.

Yet I don’t understand why this is still relevant as there aren’t any (relevant) low-level languages except assembler in use today.

So you get:

Low-level

• Assembler

Definitely not low-level

• C
• BASIC
• FORTRAN
• COBOL
• …

High-level

• C++
• Ruby
• Python
• PHP
• …

And if assembler is low-level, how could you put for example C into the same list. I mean: C is extremely high-level compared to assembler. Same even for COBOL, Fortran, etc.

• So why does everybody keep mentioning high and low-level languages if assembler is really the only low-level language?

Answer 1

According to Wikipedia, the low level languages are machine code and assembly.

From the source:

In computer science, a low-level
programming language is a programming
language that provides little or no
abstraction from a computer’s
instruction set architecture. The word
“low” refers to the small or
nonexistent amount of abstraction
between the language and machine
language; because of this, low-level
languages are sometimes described as
being “close to the hardware.”

Then, to answer:

So why does everybody keep mentioning high and low-level languages if assembler is really the only low-level language.

I don’t know who “everyone” is, but I would venture a guess that back when high-level languages were not as commonplace as they are today, it was more relevant to talk about low-level vs. high-level (because there was a relatively significant amount of programmers writing assembly code). In modern times it is a less important distinction. Personally, I rarely hear people using these terms except to differentiate between assembly or not (except for those times when you might hear someone raised on Python referring to C or C++ as low-level, but this is not in the spirit of the original definition).