One of the purposes of using intermediate code in compilers is to

Intermediate code serves as a machine-independent bridge between the front end (lexical analysis, parsing, semantic analysis) and the back end (code generation, target-specific optimizations) of a compiler.

Key benefits include:

• Modularity and Portability: If there are $M$ source languages and $N$ target architectures, writing a separate compiler for each pair requires $M \times N$ compilers. With a common intermediate representation (IR), only $M$ front ends and $N$ back ends are needed ($M + N$).

• Reusability of Optimizers: Machine-independent optimizations (e.g., constant propagation, common subexpression elimination, dead code elimination, loop optimization) can be implemented once on the intermediate code and reused across different source languages and target architectures.

Therefore, option (C) is the correct answer.