# Structure of .exes

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/structure-of-exes/220298>\
**Category:** programming\
**Created:** [March 24, 2007, 10:08pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/structure-of-exes/220298 "2007-03-24T22:08:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Al6200](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@Al6200](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/Al6200)\
**Post date:** [March 24, 2007, 10:08pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/structure-of-exes/220298/1 "2007-03-24T22:08:25Z")

</div>

A few days ago I decided to embark upon an ambitious project, one that I had strong doubts I could ever make work: my own programming language.

I’ve made strong progress on lexical analysis, and division of the code into usable chunks.

Even if I get the lexical analysis to work perfectly, I doubt I’ll know enough assembly to allow my programming language to translate into machine code.

So here is my question: how are .exes structured? Any articles or documentation?

Also, I’ve just started on the function parsing, and I’m thinking I want to treat functions as a sort of a preprocessor directive. In C/C++, are functions a language construct?