Question #5:
Research in the net the most recent assembler. Describe its history, nature and applications. Evaluate this assembler from its predecessor.
Answer:
Historically, a large number of programs have been written entirely in assembly language. Operating systems were almost exclusively written in assembly language until the widespread acceptance of
C in the 1970s and early 1980s. Many commercial applications were written in assembly language as well, including a large amount of the IBM mainframe software written by large corporations.
The Assembler for the VIC-20 was written by Don French and published by
French Silk. At 1639 bytes in length, its author believes it is the smallest symbolic assembler ever written.
Typically a modern
assembler creates
object code by translating assembly instruction mnemonics into
opcodes, and by resolving
symbolic names for memory locations and other entities.
[1] The use of symbolic references is a key feature of assemblers, saving tedious calculations and manual address updates after program modifications,Assemblers are generally simpler to write than
compilers for
high-level languages, and have been available since the 1950s.
Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language#Assembler