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Do all processor chips have the same architecture?
No. Each family of processor chip (MIPS, PIC, SPARC, Alpha, Motorola, Intel, et al.) has its own architecture.
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(Rhetorical) Does your understanding of computers depend on which assembly language you study?
No. A well-designed modern assembly language is best, but any one is OK.
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At the time of this writing, tens of thousands of dot.com workers have been laid off.How many of them were making car payments on a Jaguar?How many of them knew assembly language?
Employment is still strong for computer scientists, who have a broad understanding of how computers work. The used car lots of Silicon Valley are full of Jaguars repossessed from people with superficial understanding of computers, now unemployed. (according to a recent news story).
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In what order are machine instructions executed by the basic machine cycle?
In sequential order, one after another.
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Inspect the instruction. Is it clear what the bits of the instruction mean?
No.
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Once you know assembly language, is it hard to write an assembly language statement?
No.
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Do you think that languages such as COBOL, C, and Pascal are translated like FORTRAN?
Yes.
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Is the architecture of the VAX similar to that of MIPS?
No. The two machines are very different.
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(Hard thought question:) What type of problem is assembly language best suited for?
Problems that involve the very computer the program is running on.
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It it necessary to install four billion bytes of RAM on a MIPS computer? (Hint: the address range of a MIPS is the same as that of a 32-bit Pentium).
No. Both processors have the same range of logical addresses, but there need not be actual RAM behind each address.
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(Hard Thought Question:) Must a machine language program be run on an actual processor chip (i.e., on hardware)? Hint: Think about Java.
No. Sometimes machine instructions (such as Java .class files) are interpreted by software.
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Is it possible to run an emulator for a MIPS processor on an actual hardware MIPS processor?
Of course. Say that the emulator is written in C. Compile the emulator and run it on a MIPS computer. Now the program running on the MIPS is a MIPS emulator. This is a very computer-science-like notion.
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(Software Engineering Question:) Why translate many individual source files? Why not have one, big, complete program that translates into a complete, ready-to-run executable?
Enterprise-wide programs are hundreds of thousands of lines long and take hundreds of programmers and support staff. It just would not work if they were all working on one big monster source program.
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C compilers come with libraries of useful functions. The standard math library contains functions like sin, cos, and rand. What do you suppose a software library is?
A library is a collection of object modules which can be linked to the object module of your program.
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