Cary Coutant ccoutant@gmail.com
Thu Apr 5 15:58:00 GMT 2018

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> I have also often wonder why the default output name is a.out, which does
> not make a lot of sense to me.

Well, the "a" in "a.out" stands for "assembler". This dates back to
olden days when one might write a whole program in assembly language,
and the assembler would produce an absolute, fully-bound, executable
image. The first Unix linker adopted the same default output name
because of that.

-cary

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