Modern C for Absolute Beginners: A Friendly Introduction to the C Programming Language

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024

S. DmitrovićModern C for Absolute Beginnershttps://doi.org/10.1007/979-8-8688-0224-9_23

23. Preprocessor

Slobodan Dmitrović¹  

(1)

Belgrade, Serbia

 

When we compile our program, many things are happening in sequence, and here, we will take a look at the three major steps:

• Preprocessing

• Compilation

• Linking

The preprocessing is a process in which the preprocessor modifies the content of our source file(s) in various ways. The compiler then compiles the source code and turns it into object files. The linker then links the object files together and produces an executable file or a library.

When we start the compilation process, a preprocessor tool modifies our file’s ...