Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 30th Jun 2005 12:26 UTC
For Linux users, HLA is a strong programming tool that allows them to create powerful programs on a variety of different levels. As HLA becomes more feature-rich, additional applications will be written using HLA under Linux. With HLA and Linux, programmers can develop new and exciting applications anyone can use. Read more.
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Anonymous wrote:>>>>>>>>
I thought HLA was called C. I am not joking, isn't that how people write C compilers?
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<&l t;<<<<<<
Early on, C garnered a reputation as a "lower-level" language because it offered bit-manipulation operations that were absent from most other popular HLLs at the time. At the time C was created, "bit twiddling" was pretty much the domain of assembly language, so when C introduced these facilities (and a few other facilities that mapped directly to PDP-11 machine instructions, such as the "++" and "--" operators), people began claiming that C was a low-level language.
Of course, it didn't help things that the C language itself contained no built-in I/O (common in most other languages) and relied totally on library routines for this facility (just like assembly languages did).
Time passed, and languages became ever more higher level (think Java, Python, Ruby, etc.) and from the perspective of these programmers, C become the new "low-level language".
But C is *not* an assembly language, but definition. C is architecture-independent (well, within reasonable bounds) and you do *not* have access to low-level machine facilities in the C language. If C were truly an assembly language, for example, why would the need exist for "in-line assembly" sequences?
As for how people write C compilers, I have no idea what you mean by the question "isn't that how people write C compilers?" One might argue that a few (non-standard) C compilers for embedded processors are written to replace assembly language, but ANSI-C is not an assembly replacement. You don't get access to the underlying machine, which is what assembly language is all about.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde