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History of C++

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A Brief History of C++

Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, at Bell Labs

C++ was written by Bjarne
Stroustrup at Bell Labs during 1983-1985. C++ is an extension of
C. Prior to 1983, Bjarne Stroustrup added features to C and formed
what he called "C with Classes". He had combined the Simula's use
of classes and object-oriented features with the power and efficiency of
C. The term C++ was first used in 1983.

C++ was developed
significantly after its first release.¹ In particular,
"ARM C++" added exceptions and templates, and ISO C++ added RTTI,
namespaces, and a standard library.¹

C++ was
designed for the UNIX system environment. With C++ programmers could
improve the quality of code they produced and reusable code was easier to
write.

Bjarne Stroustrup had studied in the doctoral program
at the Computing Laboratory at Cambridge University prior to joining Bell
Labs. Now, Bell Labs no longer has that name since part of Bell Labs
became AT&T Labs. The
other half became Lucent Bell labs.

Sound file on
the proper pronunciation of Bjarne Stroustrup
What is
C++?

C Programming Language and Algol68's Inspiration

Prior to C++, C was a programming language developed at
Bell Labs circa 1969-1973. The UNIX operating system was also being
developed at Bell Labs at the same time. C was originally developed for
and implemented on the UNIX operating system, on a PDP-11 computer by Dennis
Ritchie. He extended the B language by adding types in 1971. He called
this NB for New B. Ritchie credited some of his inspiration from theAlgol68 language.
Ritchie restructured the language and rewrote the compiler and gave his
new language the name "C" in 1972. 90% of UNIX was then written in
C. The committee that wrote the 1989 ANSI Standard for C had started work
on the C Standard project in 1983 after having been established by ANSI in
that year. There were quite a number of versions of C at that time and a
new Standard was necessary.

C is portable, not tied to any
particular hardware or operating system. C combines the elements of
high-level languages with the functionality of assembly language and has
occasionally been referred to as a middle-level computer language. C makes
it easy to adapt software for one type of computer to another.
History of
C

B Language and BCPL

C was a direct descendant of the language B. The language
B was developed by Ken
Thompson in 1970 for the new UNIX OS. B was a descendant of the
language BCPL designed by Martin Richards, a
Cambridge University student visiting MIT.¹
See BCPL New Version,
2004