Building





Building is either the act of creating an object assembled from more than
one element, or the object itself. A building is usually a human-created
object composed of more than a single element, permanently fixed to the
ground, that mediates one or more aspects of the environment.

Buildings may be as simple as a lone roof providing shelter from the rain
for a single occupant, or as complex as a hospital regulating temperature,
air flow, light, gas content, bacteria movement, particle flow, pressure,
and people movement and activities.

The design construction and operation of buildings is as old as humankind.
Architects today design most large-scale buildings in a team with a large
number of specialized engineers. Small residential buildings do not usually
involve extensive work by architects or engineers.

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Building can also refer to the act of assembling a computer program from one
or more source files. In which case, like a building, the foundation must be
laid. The foundations necessary in building a program are the compiler, and
other dependency all spelled out in list files, and makefiles. On Windows
and Mac OS Classic, you always need to obtain a compiler since those
operating systems don't include one. In addition, when compiling Unix
programs, or if you are interested in running a Unix environment or an
environment with mostly open source software, people frequently require or
recommend cygwin. While the difference doesn't really matter, building
refers to the whole process of preparing a source to be run, wheras
compiling is a step in the process.