Understanding Compiling

The C++ compilation process consists of several phases. Some of the phases are intended to analyze the source code, and others generate and optimize the target machine code. The following diagram shows the phases of compilation:

Let's look at each of these phases in detail.

Tokenization

The analysis phase of the compiler aims to split the source code into small units called tokens. A token may be a word or just a single symbol, such as = (the equals sign). A token is the smallest unit of the source code that carries meaningful value for the compiler. For example, the expression int a = 42; will be divided into the tokens int, a, =, 42, and ;. The expression isn't just split by spaces, because...