Answer:
(A) Assembly language should be avoided for general application development for the following reasons:
i. It is difficult to write assembly language codes. It does not contain many tools and in-built functions to help with the development of these applications.
ii. Since general application development requires that the application be machine independent, writing such applications in assembly language (which is a low level, machine dependent language) might be a pain as it would require that the writer have sufficient knowledge of hardware and operating systems.
(B) The following are the circumstances where assembly language should be used:
i. Assembly languages are low level languages that are very close to machine languages that the machine or processor understands. Therefore, when writing codes for programs that should directly communicate with the processor, assembly language should be used.
ii. Since assembly language codes are machine dependent, when there is a need to write applications for target machines, they should be used.
iii. If there is a need to have very great control of certain features of your application and resources to be consumed such as amount of RAM, clock speed e.t.c, assembly languages are a great tool.
(C) Some of the advantages of compiled language over an interpreted language are:
i. Compiled languages are way faster than interpreted languages because the compiled languages are converted directly into native machine codes that are easy for the processor to execute. Put in a better way, with compiled languages, codes are compiled altogether before execution and therefore reduces the overhead caused at run time. Interpreted languages on the other hand executes codes line after line thereby increasing the overhead at run time.
ii. Since codes are compiled first before execution in compiled languages, nice and powerful optimizations can be applied during the compilation stage.
(D) Interpreted languages could be chosen over compiled languages for the following reasons:
i. Interpreted languages are much more flexible and easier to implement than compiled languages as writing good compilers is not easy.
ii. Since interpreters don't need to convert first to intermediary codes as they execute these codes themselves, programs built with interpreters tend to be platform independent.
