1.6) Creating An Executable Program

C++ source code is translated into an executable program by a compiler, which performs the following tasks in sequence:

1. Preprocessing, to merge header files (.hpp suffix) into C++ source files (.cpp suffix) and handles issues such as conditional compilation of code sections
2. Compilation, to translate preprocessed source files into assembly language files - essentially, a human-readable form of the machine language understood by the CPU
3. Assembly, to turn assembly language files into object code files
4. Linking, to combine object code files with library code and create a single executable