Another discussion in this thread reminded me of a paper on linguistics and programming languages that I read a while ago. The paper is in French, but in the days of automatic translation that shouldn't be a problem any more (OK, I admit I never tried to have a whole paper translated). It discusses the differences between formal languages used in CS theory (e.g. lambda calculus) and formal languages used to write actual programs, and notes that the latter have many characteristics of natural human languages that one wouldn't expect in formal systems from a purely formal point of view. Examples given are traces of historical evolution, such as traces of K&R C in ANSI C, redundancies such as multiple formally equivalent loop constructs (while / until etc.), expletives such as no-ops and comments, etc. Another argument is the existence of a "literature", e.g. the Unix source code as a literature for C.

Meles Philological Approach EN 2.pdf

Thanks @guitarvydas, that's a pretty good translation! No obvious mistakes on a quick scan, not even the frequent one made by early translation tools that translated the titles in the reference section.

I got Claude Sonnet 4.6 to do the translation. I don't know enough French to compare the original against the translation.

Yes, assembler is included. Also machine opcodes.