wrong. C has no lower level control of anything than C++ has. C++ is nearly 100% backwards compatible with C, so that nearly any valid C program is a valid C++ program. what C has as an advantage in system programming is its type-safety on pointers. you cannot simply assign one pointer to another of a different type in C++. you must perform an explicit cast, and that is a good thing. if C had type-safe pointers, many, if not all, pointer bugs could be completely avoided.