C++: A Historical Perspective

We begin our journey of C++ with a little history. C, the predecessor to C++, has become one of the most popular programming languages. Originally designed for systems programming, C enables programmers to write efficient code and provided close access to the machine. C compilers, found on practically every Unix system, are now available with most operating systems.

During the 1980s and into the 1990s, an explosive growth in object-oriented technology began with the introduction of the Smalltalk language. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) began to replace the more traditional structured programming techniques. This explosion led to the development of languages which support programming with objects. Many new object-oriented programming languages appeared: Object-Pascal, Modula-2, Mesa, Cedar, Neon, Objective-C, LISP with the Common List Object System (CLOS), and, of course, C++. Although many of these languages appeared in the 1980s, many ideas of OOP were taken from Simula-67. Yes! OOP has been around since 1967.

C++ originated with Bjarne Stroustrop. In the simplest sense, if not the most accurate, we can consider it to be a better C. Although it is not an entirely new language, C++ represents a significant extension of C abilities. We might then consider C to be a subset of C++. C++ supports essentially every desirable behavior and most of the undesirable ones of its predecessor, but provides general language improvements as well as adding OOP capability. Note that using C++ does not imply that your are doing OOP. C++ does not force you to use its OOP features. You can simply create structured code that uses only C++'s non-OOP features.