Leave no room for a lower-level language below C++ (except assembler)

Excerpts from Bjarne Stroustrup’s book “The Design and Evolution of C++”

“To remain a viable systems programming language, C++ must maintain C’s ability to access hardware directly, to control data structure layout, and to have primitive operation and data types that map on to hardware in a on-to-one fashion. The alternative is to use C or assembler. The language design talk is to isolate the low-level features and render them unnecessary for code that doesn’t deal directly with system details. The aim is to protect programmers against accidental misuse without imposing undue burdens.”