C++ programming language

C++ programming language

Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++


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C++

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

C++ ("C Plus Plus", pronounced /ˌsiːˌplʌsˈplʌs/) is a general-purpose programming language.

C++ is regarded as a middle-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features.[1] It is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled language where compilation creates machine code for the target machine hardware, supports procedural programming, data abstraction, object-oriented programming, and generic programming.
Bjarne Stroustrup developed C++ in 1979 at Bell Labs as an enhancement to the C programming language and named it "C with Classes". In 1983, it was renamed to C++. Enhancements started with the addition of classes, followed by, among other features, virtual functions, operator overloading, multiple inheritance, templates, and exception handling. The C++ programming language standard was ratified in 1998 as ISO/IEC 14882:1998, the current version of which is the 2003 version, ISO/IEC 14882:2003. A new version of the standard (known informally as C++0x) is being developed.

Etymology
According to Stroustrup: "the name signifies the evolutionary nature of the changes from C".[3] During C++'s development period, the language had been referred to as "new C", then "C with Classes". The final name is credited to Rick Mascitti (mid-1983) and was first used in December 1983. When Mascitti was questioned informally in 1992 about the naming, he indicated that it was given in a tongue-in-cheek spirit. It stems from C's "++" operator (which increments the value of a variable after evaluating it) and a common naming convention of using "+" to indicate an enhanced computer program. There is no language called "C plus". ABCL/c+ was the name of an earlier, unrelated programming language.

Incompatibility with C
For more details on this topic, see Compatibility of C and C++.
C++ is often considered to be a superset of C, but this is not strictly true.[15] Most C code can easily be made to compile correctly in C++, but there are a few differences that cause some valid C code to be invalid in C++, or to behave differently in C++.

C and Other Languages
Compatibility of C and C++ · Operators in C and C++ · Comparison of Pascal and C · C to Java byte-code compiler