meet your new god PL/I

We live in a world where C and C++ are the only game in town as far as compile to platform languages. Java, C# and even scripting languages like Python and Ruby are all garbage collected VM languages that only provide a bandaid to all of C and C++'s problems. There is a solution, PL/I, a very full featured systems, scientific and enterprise language that handles all the issues that C and C++ leave the programmer to work out on his own. Read this comparison between C and PL/I and you'll see its a very serious systems programming language what was and still is ahead of its time:
http://www.uni-muenster.de/ZIV.EberhardSturm/PL1andC.html

(PL/I is pronounced pee-el-one, not pee-el-eye, it stands for "Programming Language One")

>>46
No they don't. I've written a lot of inline asm in my days. It's just needed for platform dependent tasks. I could give you hundreds of examples, but let's try a few simple ones:
1) Do input/output to some port or interface with some hardware.
2) Perform some complex SIMD arith (see: MMX, SSE on x86), and have your compiler generate code which means exactly what you intended the code to do.
3) Write some exception handler setup code (you can't use non-ANSI C extensions here) or write the OS'es exception handling system.
4) Write a task or thread switcher. Alternatively, write a usermode-only fiber(similar to green threads) system.(you have to save all the registers and state and be able to restore them).

(You're not allowed to use someone else's library, or if you really want to use it, you have to prove it didn't use any form of assembly and was written in pure C. Using system calls is also not permitted, unless you can prove they were written in pure C as well.)

I could go on, but I'll leave it at that for now. You can do either of this in C or even Lisp or other languages, but you will need to have something generate the assembly for you, usually you'll have the compiler do it, but sometimes you'll need more precision or the compiler can't generate the exact code you want, so you'll want to write it directly in assembly.