C++: A Dialog Programming with the C++ Standard Library

Chapter 5. Functional Literacy

C++ was intended to be useful in writing large programs. Such programs are usually composed of many implementation files, as I mentioned in Chapter 3.

In such a case, we must have some way of creating an executable program (sometimes abbreviated to just an executable) from a number of implementation files. We also need some way for code in one module to refer to code in another one. Similarly, we have to be able to specify where execution of our program should start; this is taken care of by the C++ rule that execution always starts at the block called main.

As we've already seen, the computer can't execute source code. Therefore, any implementation files we write have to be translated into object code; the result ...