When the output file is the same as the input file ...

[Cary Coutant]

> I have also often wonder why the default output name is a.out, which does
> not make a lot of sense to me.

Well, the "a" in "a.out" stands for "assembler". This dates back to
olden days when one might write a whole program in assembly language,
and the assembler would produce an absolute, fully-bound, executable
image. The first Unix linker adopted the same default output name
because of that.

-cary