We know that a project delivers
the output as exe files. I mean, there are other forms also like
dll, ocx etc., but here in this write-up I will discuss about the exe. The EXE
stands for executable and that means the operating system with the
help of the processor executes the instruction specified in the Exe file. This
exe is a binary file and it also has information required by the Operating
system in the file header. In the meantime its majority of the content is for
the Processor of the machine that runs it.
The header of the exe file
contains information required for the operating system. OS knows how much
memory to allocate in the data segment and how much code
segment memory is required to load the instruction set packed inside
the executable from this header. Well. As already told in the blogs, data
segment is responsible for the entire program scoped constants, global
variables etc. Whereas code segment is responsible for holding the instruction
set that a Processor understands. We call this header as Process control
Block. You can do a web search to know more about it.
Next
to the process control block is the actual exe contents, which is nothing but
the instruction set and its data processing in the form of microprocessor's opcode
format. We call this assembly language and that mean it is not that opening an
exe file in word processor will reveal the assembly code for you.