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low-level programming language
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programming language that provides minimal abstraction from the hardware
~9 min read
Encyclopedic overview
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A low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture, memory or underlying physical hardware; commands or functions in the language are structurally similar to a processor's instructions. These languages provide the programmer with full control over program memory and the underlying machine code instructions. Because of the low level of abstraction (hence the term "low-level") between the language and machine language, low-level languages are sometimes described as being "close to the hardware".
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “low-level programming language” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.