Under that classification, what is a low level language then? Even Forth abstracts away registers, and allows structured programming (or a sort). Is the set of low level languages that people have heard of in 2013 an empty set?
"Heard of", maybe not. But "working with" I can believe. A friend of mine was writing an assembler with a built-in arithmetic expression syntax last year.
Clearly it was low-level, because it wasn't trying to abstract away hardware - but it also wasn't just a straight-up (macro) assembly language, since it provided some specific features that needed a more sophisticated compiler to work properly.
When we speak of low-level coding, almost any abstraction can constitute a huge jump in power from the machine language.
