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On 18-Jan-2002 at 19:45:05 lee quick wrote:
i write a source file say : Example.c then GCC Example.c produces an executable called a.out ? sure enough a.out works but why is it not called Example.out
Well, going back a *long* way, when I was at Uni, we used PDP computers to learn assembler language. The binary produced by a program was literally 'dumped' out by the system and called 'a.out' - i.e. the assembler crashed and dumped the assembled code. That was your program. Since C stems from these early days, I would say the use of 'a.out' was a legacy of those times. Why it was actually called 'a.out', as opposed' to 'b.out' or just 'output', I couldn't say for sure. Perhaps it was because one of the precursors to C was the language 'A', so output from it would be 'a.out'? Perhaps for C it should have changed to 'c.out' :-) I suspect something like the Kernighan and Ritchie C book would say something about this (in the preface perhaps). My copy is at home, so I can't say for sure. And as always I could be wrong about this :-) Regards, John. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914 E-mail: jhorne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx PGP key available from public key servers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.