7.1 C Program Development Life Cycle

• There are 4 steps to create any program in C. 
• These steps are in a certain order, and each step has its own importance.

Development Life Cycle in C

1. First you write a program. This is called editing part of program development life cycle. This program is in human readable format.
2. After this you compile the program. This is the second step of development life cycle. By removing all the errors in this part, the program is converted to binary format so that the computer can process it.
3. After this there is a linking process. In this process, the program is linked with the necessary libraries. As you know, C's basic program can also be executed without including the libraries. The Libraries C program provides the environment to execute.
4. After this, the executable file is produced. Which you can execute as often as you want. The output of the editing process is .c source file. The compiling process has an input source .c file and output is .obj file. The linking process has an input .obj file and output is a .exe file.