I hate the term "high level assembly" when applied to C since it's loaded against assembly (in the sense of C as its superset) which is obviously not true.

C is full of undefined behavior, assembly is not.

High level != Superset

Actually we often give up features and specialize with high level languages. That's why there are things easier to do in Ruby than in C++ and vice versa.

They are all (usually much more convenient) subsets of assembly.

What ? Assembly has undefined behavior, for example wrt unaligned access on some processors.