There are many reasons why C is not a low level language. Take the example: while `asm()` blocks are a common extension to C compilers, anything within the block is (a) compiler dependent and (b) architecture dependent. To choose an extreme counter example: you may as well claim that versions of BASIC with the POKE keyword are low level languages simply because you can POKE machine code directly into memory.

Yet one of the more interesting reasons, in my mind, is that C adds a tonne of abstractions. The roster of data types is one of those abstractions. Processors have a very weak notion of data types, and memory has absolutely no notion of memory types at all. For example: casting a `float` to an `int` has a very specific definition in C, and that definition involves altering the pattern of bits. While you can create a float and force the C compiler to regard that memory location as an int (via casting pointers), it isn't how the language is meant to be used (outside of rare cases).

If I recall correctly, some of the direct predecessors of C were typeless, which is closer to how the CPU and RAM treat data.

That's fair. C is very old and used for almost all hardware so I think while you can make the argument that "only clang and gcc extensions asm blocks available like that, and intrinsics are only available through vendor-specific headers" and be right, by that same logic literally nothing except binary machine code for hardware without any kind of microcode can be low-level, and even then it's probably always hardware dependent (because if it's not fully bijective to the actual hardware it's implemented on top of, the semantics leak).

Practically speaking, we have a word for the kind of "abstractionless" model you're describing: machine code. I mean, even assembler is a bunch of abstractions about 'registers' and 'instructions' that are really just specific portions of the hardware or opcodes!

So we either descend endlessly into pedantry arguing that cosmic rays and electron tunnelling represent inexcusable deviations from the overly abstracted semantics that hardware vendors expose in their products or maybe we draw the line somewhere else.

You may not agree with mine, that "practical and simple interop with machine-level language impls across a high-level language interface is sufficiently close to the hardware as to be low level" but there has to be a limit somewhere between that and "technically the hardware's operating temperature is part of its logical semantics because if it exceeds a certain value for long enough it starts to degrade and yield incorrect results or terminate execution". I think eventually it just becomes unproductive nerd sniping, personally

> Processors have a very weak notion of data types

This is absolutely not true, unless you mean to say that processors should somehow support composite (aka C struct) data types as an instruction primitive. Processor operations have to be strongly typed, by definition. For example, these are the data types supported by operations in the modern x86 instruction set (ignoring vector extensions):

- signed and unsigned integers of 8, 16, 32 and 64 bits

- floating-point decimals of 32, 64 and 80 bits (and 128 via sse)

- nul-terminated byte strings

> For example: casting a `float` to an `int` has a very specific definition in C, and that definition involves altering the pattern of bits

I don't understand this example. Casting a float to an int also has a very specific definition in IEEE-754 and is pretty much universally implemented as a hardware instruction. It has been in the x86 family since its inception: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/fisttp