5 Steps Required for the Preparation of C Program Execution

There are five steps to prepare C Program for the execution on the system, These Steps are given below:

1. Creating source Program
2. Saving the Source program
3. Compiling the Program
4. Linking in the Program
5. Loading and Running the Program 

Creating Source Program:

The first step is to write a program for the other steps to come, As we know the program written in high level language is known as source program, a source program is created in a text editor or we can direct write it in Turbo C IDE.

Saving the source program:

After writing the source program or source code now we can save it on the hard disk. The C program is saved on the hard disk in the form of text file with an extension of .c.

Compiling the program:

The process of converting the source code into machine language code is called compilation of the program, And compiler does this for us, The machine program is also called the object program, thats why it saved with an extension of .obj.

In this process errors are also removed by the programmer as the compiler specify them. Object program is saved at a separate location.

Linking in the Program:

A C program may contain predefined functions and routines. These functions are stored in a separate files, These functions are also called Library files or run-time libraries.

These files are combined with object program for the execution, And this overall process of combining the needed library functions is called linking.

  Loading and Running the Program:

In this final step program is run on the computer system, the executable file is run by loading it into the memory, This can be done by the loader or system loader. And after loading the program shows its result or output.