This generic quality typically comes at the cost of denying direct access to the machine's internal workings, and this often has negative effects on performance.
Examples include ESPOL and SPL, both of which are similar to ALGOL in syntax but tuned to their respective platforms.
The earliest system software was written in assembly language primarily because there was no alternative, but also for reasons including efficiency of object code, compilation time, and ease of debugging.
An early example of this kind of language is LRLTRAN,[4] which extended Fortran with features for character and bit manipulation, pointers, and directly addressed jump tables.
Such a language generally omits features that cannot be implemented efficiently, and adds a small number of machine-dependent features needed to access specific hardware abilities; inline assembly code, such as C's asm statement, is often used for this purpose.