[mathking]

Originally Posted by Eldarion

The fewer layers of abstraction, the faster the program will run, with assembly language being the fastest. However, this speed increase is offset by increased development time. I believe a good compromise is reached in the C programming language, as do many other robot programmers!

Assembly is only faster if you write good assembly code, and you are smarter than the writer(s) of the compiler. A good compiler with a lot of optimization can take high level language code create object code which runs faster than most of the code student programmers could write in assembly. One reason C became the language of choice for embedded chips was the creation of specific compilers which allowed for small, fast code.