Although C can be used for industrial controls, it may not be necesssary If you application is relatively simple, you can use programmable microcontrollers like Microchip's PIC or Atmel's AVR. Many of the these chips are programmed in BASIC. These chips are frequently used because they have many channels of digital IO, builtin ADC and DAC, and timers. Frequently there is enough RAM and EPROM on the chip so you don't need external memory or program storage. So what control applications do you want to do?

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The Windows API is in C++? It looks all C to me. I haven't seen any C++ classes in the Win32 library or anything else that would suggest it's C++. MFC, that's a different story.

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I know that at least for some of the kind of hardware you mention, attached to the standard interfaces on a PC, language hardly matters much. You can write such programs in Java, MatLab and even Perl. Inline assembly isn't unique to C either is it? and any compiler that compiles any language into assembly code will presumably offer it as a facility - it's not really anything to do with the language itself. It fits quite naturally in C source probably because C is a relatively thin layer on top of assembly anyway. Also, if you're programming in C, you may well be doing so precisely because you need the low level machine efficiency of it in the first place. C was designed iirc for making writing OSs easier than in assembly alone, which is probably why using inline assembly is so closely associated with it and it's compilers. If you've chosen C for a project, you're much more likely to need to go even further by using inline assembly (maybe for machine specific stuff or optimization) if not actually writing the assembly source for whole objects. Your C compiler should have good documentation about using it (gcc does) and the source trees of projects like OSs, video codec libraries and video players should be full of examples of it. So returning to the question of what's so wonderful about C (assuming your original question was meant more generally than about just hardware control), then one of the main advantages of it (and maybe C++) that I have found is the sheer speed of the code you can end up with. It is certainly my experience of mathematical libraries and programs - the GMP library for example (written in C and probably some assembly too) is afaik the fastest there is for arbitrary integer calculation. But C is not just good for complex and explicitly mathematical stuff: there was a problem a while back in this forum about finding the relative complements between pairs of files full of text records - as quickly as possible. I found that the times taken for three roughly equivalent programs in Awk (not compilable of course), Common Lisp and C were 38m, 4m33s and 50s respectively. In C it was easy to attack this - memory access and byte comparison - problem directly, with pointer manipulation and the assistance of mmap from the OS. I didn't try C++ (such a small program probably wouldn't have looked any different to the compiler than the C one) but I believe it's much harder to write optimizing compilers for more complex languages. Not only that but I find that if I write a C program and want to tune it myself with the compiler optimization flags, it is just about possible for me to understand what they mean and what effect they will have on the program. If it's C++ I have absolutely no idea of what flags to use or what the outcome will be ;-) As an aside there is an interesting tool (well - language really) called Lush that provides an analogy for the use of inline assembly in C programs. It was developed as a Lisp dialect specifically for doing large scale AI stuff like machine learning, handwriting recognition, scientific visualization and other heavily mathematical work. Lisp is the ideal language for this kind of stuff but it is often desirable to have highly optimized code in parts of those kinds of project. Lush meets that requirement by allowing you to write inline C code (not just interfacing with external C libraries) - just like a C programmer might use inline assembly. Sorry to go on at such length but the intermingling of different languages, accessing of alien libraries and matters of balancing optimization and productivity are especially interesting to me at the moment :)

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"Easier != More Powerful" I think that's about as far from the truth as you can get. Assembler is the most powerful language, it can do anything, access any bit of memory. As for it being 'easier' than other languages, sorry, the only thing harder than Assembler is reading a HEX dump directly. The higher level the language, the easier it is. Look at COBOL; MOVE a TO b. You can't get much easier than COBOL, or BASIC. But they cannot do everything Assembler can do. Assembler is about as close as you are going to get to thinking like a computer. All the other languages we designed to help humans understand them and write easier.

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