Steve Hall wrote:
I have some small programs that I wrote in high school on an old TRS-80
model II that will still run, and they are written in BASIC! High level
languages are the ones that give the most problems, stay with the lower
level and they will run forever!

BASIC *is* a high level language! High level means (roughly) 'far
removed from the underlying architecture'. Many 'serious' languages,
like C, tend to reveal a bit more of the underlying magic, the idea
being that programmers sometimes need to do things outside of the model
of the high level language, or that it's faster to write stuff more
directly for the machine.

This view held widely until the past few years, at least, when practical
considerations forced it out; the speed advantages are only that great
in very specialist situations, while portability of code and just not
having to worry about the intricacies of the architecture have given
languages like Java, Perl, Python, etc. a significant boost into the
market to compete with C and C++.

ABS