In order to be able to make a program, quite a lot of tools are needed:
Earliest an editor is used to create the source program. Next a compiler, which is nothing more than a program that "translates" the source program into an object program. And third, a linker that produces the executable program from the object program.
The editor can be any text editor at hand, and as a compiler we will use the TASM macro assembler from Borland, and like a linker we will use the Tlink program.
The addition used so that TASM identifies the source programs in assembler is .ASM; once translated the source program, the TASM generates a file with the .OBJ extension, this file holds an "intermediate format" of the program, called similar to this because it is not executable yet but it is not a program in source language either any longer. The linker generates, from a
.OBJ or a combination of a number of these files, an executable program, whose extension frequently is .EXE although it can as well be .COM, depending of the form it was assembled.