title: Wanted: good definition of the term "lowering" in the context of compilers
body: <p>Can anyone point me to a good definition of the term "lowering" in the context of compilers?</p>
  
  <p>From what I can tell, it is the translation of a higher-level operation into an equivalent combination of lower-level operations, but I'm not really sure, and I can't find one after a few minutes of searching on Google. (There are a few usages of "lowering" e.g. in <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/GNU_C_Compiler_Internals/GNU_C_Compiler_Architecture_4_1#Lowering_Passes">GCC</a> or <a href="http://llvm.org/docs/WritingAnLLVMBackend.html">LLVM</a> but no references to a definition.)</p>