1.1 A Brief History of C++

In 1970 two programmers, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, created a new language called C. (The name came about because C was preceded by the old programming language they were using called B.) C was designed with one goal in mind: writing operating systems. The language was extremely simple and flexible and soon was used for many different types of programs. It quickly became one of the most popular programming languages in the world.

C had one major problem, however. It was a procedure-oriented language. This meant that in designing a typical C program, the programmer would start by describing the data and then write procedures to manipulate that data.

Programmers eventually discovered that it made a program clearer and easier to understand if they were able to take a bunch of data and group it together with the operations that worked on that data. Such a grouping is called an object or class. Designing programs by designing classes is known as object-oriented design (OOD).

In 1980 Bjarne Stroustrup started working on a new language, called "C with Classes." This language improved on C by adding a number of new features, the most important of which was classes. This language was improved, augmented, and finally became C++.

C++ owes its success to the fact that it allows the programmer to organize and process information more effectively than most other languages. Also, it builds on the work already done with the C language. In fact, most C programs can be transformed into C++ programs with little trouble. These programs usually don't use all the new features of C++, but they do work. In this way, C++ allows programmers to build on an existing base of C code.