What is history of C++?

The C++ programming language has a history going back to 1979, when Bjarne Stroustrup was doing work for his Ph.D. thesis. One of the languages Stroustrup had the opportunity to work with was a language called Simula, which as the name implies is a language primarily designed for simulations. The Simula 67 language which was the variant that Stroustrup worked with, is regarded as the first language to support the object-oriented programming paradigm. Stroustrup found that this paradigm was very useful for software development, however the Simula language was far too slow for practical use. read less

The first C++ compiler known as cfront was written by the developer at AT&T. It strong ties to C language. At the beginning, the developer and other scientists viewed the work done as an extension of C language. Actually Bjarne Stroustup wanted to add some new features in the subset of C++ that support Object Oriented concepts. In the subsequent years, he succeeded in his goal which is now adays called the C++ language with object oriented approach. C++ is a separate language to C and is almost a proper superset of C. It is for your information that the original version was called, “C with classes”. In 1989, the first true C++ compiler, G++, was written by Michael Tiemann of Cygnus was able to produce code for most of the targets that GCC already supported. In late 90’s and the years following, a number of new C++ compilers were produced but many were unable to keep pace with the standards committee. This era of no development is the fundamental cause of non-portable of C++ programs. One of the plus p[oints of the language and especially the standard one is that it encompasses the language interface to the standard library and also the Standard Template Library (STL). There are many new features added in this language but a few of them are presented in the following manner. Built in tool (Boolean) type Exceptions Casts Namespaces The mutable keyword Templates Standard Template library (STL) Conclusion There are only a few incompatibilities with C and they are new keywords such as New, delete, Void* pointer type conversion, etc. The last thing which should also be mentioned is that the improved comments where the delimiter gives two types of flavor. The first flavor is the C comment delimiters and the new one is the form of double slash. At the end I would say briefly that C was redesigned, extended and the reimplementation of this process, the resulting language is now called the C++ language. read less