I guess you can say that .

Usually, no, most programming language implementations compile directly to machine code - they don’t go through assembly, unless you ask them to (e.g. the “-S” flag in GCC). They often have something called “IR” (Intermediate Representation), though. Assembly is mostly just for humans.

uh, sort of? assembly is just the human readable form of the processor's machine language. an assembler does the parsing and translation. however, most modern assemblers add preprocessing, macros, and what might be considered "abstraction," by allowing stuff like variables to reference memory addresses. higher level languages are eventually translated to machine language to run, so definitely abstraction there.