To begin with, let's look at a simple application program. In the simple programs we've seen up until now, we haven't needed it because the compiler's defaults worked fine. Every program that we've seen up until now has executed as a process , but this program will not. We defined processes in one of the first articles in this series, but we'll review that definition now. This entails allocating a number of tables and blocks of storage, including a special area in memory called the stack .
Every process has exactly one stack.
The stack contains the data owned by that process. Compiling Programs Figure 2 shows the two programs being compiled using the commands and procedures we introduced in part 9 of this series. If you had wanted to use the 1985 standard, you'd have entered the COB85XL command instead. Each of the commands shown in Figure 2 creates an object file. But doing things this way would defeat the purpose of software runtime libraries.