DB> What's a linker for?  why would you need one?

A linker reads the OBJ file created by the compiler and outputs any of
EXE, LIB or DLL.  You don't need one if you never want to run your
program.

DB> Why can't a compiler have one built in to create an executable?

Turbo Pascal has the linker built in to the compiler.  Since it
doesn't produce an OBJ, its code can never be ported to other platforms
(or even other versions of Turbo Pascal, for that matter) without
having to be recompiled from scratch.

 * KWQ/2 1.2i *

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