History of C++

History of C++

              In 1960sdifferent languages were used for different applications, for example, FORTRANfor Engineering Application, COBOL for Commercial Application and so on. Later on an international committee was set up that developed a single language called ALGOL 60, Which can be used for all application. But this language was too abstract and too general to be accepted. This lead to the development of a new language named CPL ( Combined Programming Language), which had so many features and was hard to learn and implement. After this Martin Richards BCPL(Basic Combined Programming Language) and Ken Thompson’s B language were also not accepted because they were too specific to be implemented. Finally, in 1972, Ritchie made a successful attempt at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories of USAto develop a new language called C language by inheriting the features of both the BCPL and B languages. In order to define the C language, a committee was set up to create an ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard called ANSI C standard, which was finally adopted by ISO (International Standard Organization) in 1989.

                      Bjarne Stroustrup ar Bell Labs initially developed C++ during the early 1980’s. it was designed to support the features of C such as efficiency and low-level support for system level coding. Added to this were features such as classes with inheritance and virtual functions. C++ is best described as a superset of C, with full support for object-oriented programming. Though C is an excellent language for writing efficient system programs, but for other types of programs, C code can be hard to understand, C programs can also be prone to certain types of error. The extra object-oriented facilities in C++ are partly included to overcome these shortcomings.