Re: Top 10 most common hard skills listed on resumes...

On 08.09.2024 02:05, Waldek Hebisch wrote:

Bart <bc@freeuk.com> wrote:
 

What started the subthread was the question of which HLL goes between
ASM and C (since someone suggested that C was mid-level).

 
Well, for me important question is how much work is due to tools
(basically overhead) and how much deals with problem domain.

Indeed.

[...]  As a devils
advocate let me compare typical implementation of early Pascal
with C modern C.  [...]  In early Pascal
one had to declare all local variables at the start of
a fucntion.  C has block structure, so one can limit variable
scope to area where variable makes sense.

Pascal has also "blocks structure". It differs in some details,
e.g., as you say, declarations are not part of the blocks (for
reasons beyond relevance here).

But yes, local declarations are fine (and already known these
days from other block-oriented HLLs).

But to be fair, Pascal has nested functions - something that
"C" doesn't have; or did that change recently? - with their
own types, constants, variables, and functions/procedures.
So there's a locality of declarations in another, Pascal way.

[...]  Early Pascal has a
bunch of features not present in C, but one can reasonably consider
modern C to be higher level than early Pascal.

I wouldn't second that. In the "_problem domain_" category that
you mentioned above Pascal always appeared to me to at least
produce much more ("semantically") legible code as opposed to
that heap of syntax trash we are used from "C".

The stronger typing and safe constructs (no pointer arithmetic)
from these days' Pascal I also consider a substantial criterion
of a HLL.

And _a lot_
of early languages were at lower level than Pascal.

Janis