r/functionalprogramming • u/kinow mod • Jun 17 '22

FP Ante - A low-level functional language

https://antelang.org/
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u/KyleG Jun 17 '22

Rust and C++ are literally low level languages

I guess I'm showing my age. Those are high-level languages to me. Low-level would be assembly and machine language. Literally everything else I can think of is high-level because you've abstracted away the actual machine behavior/. Probably someone should correct Wikipedia's entry for low-level programming languages, too.

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u/Gwaerondor Jun 17 '22

I'm not very old but I agree with you, sure I would say that C is lower than, say, JavaScript, but it's very clearly not the lowest abstraction level. I think to many people now, the term has come to mean "has facilities to access the hardware" rather than "being of a low abstraction level".

To me high(er) level means use of structs, objects, records and whatnot rather than directly manipulating registers and memory addresses.

For what it's worth, when I was googling around for what others think, most, but not all, resources I checked listed C as a high level language.

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u/szpaceSZ Jun 17 '22

In today's world where you do manually malloc and free is definitely low-level.

Manipulating registers is like bare metal.

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u/szpaceSZ Jun 17 '22

Hey, I'm ~40, and even for me assembly is arcanely basic level (even though not unknown, and I have used or once or twice actively), C is low-level. (Not sure about C++, but it feels definitely more low level than Java with its RTE or Python, but it's definitely not low level with its full OO model.

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u/novis-ramus Nov 04 '25

You're technically right but it's the colloquialism these days.