>>>> I see. So you still have to manually define what needs to be linked somehow?
>>>   How else is the compiler going to know which files are your source files?
>>> By reading your mind?
> 
>> Well, that's what I was puzzled by, yes. You guys seemed to be 
>> suggesting that you just give VS a bunch of files and it somehow "knows" 
>> how to produce a runnable executable out of them.
> 
>   Well, that is how an IDE works. You give it a bunch of source files and
> it knows how to create a runnable executable out of them.

Well, certainly you give it a bunch of files and it knows how to compile 
them. But do you want it to link them all into a single executable? Or 
maybe two seperate executables? Or perhaps you're trying to produce a 
DLL? Presumably you have to configure this somewhere...

>> This implies that an executable file contains some metadata in addition 
>> to the executable machine code itself.
> 
>   That's correct.

Interesting. I thought it was only object files that contain linker 
tables...

Mind you, having just said that... various programs have custom icons 
and so forth. That's definitely not executable code. Hmm...

[Now the old MS-DOS *.com files really *are* just bare machine code, 
always loaded at a specific machine address...]

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