History of C++

Introduction History of C++

During the 60s appeared some new programming languages, like ALGOL 60 that gathered from FORTRAN the concepts of structured programming which finally would be used by CPL and its succesors (like C++). Later ALGOL 68 also influenced directly in the development of data types in C. Nevertheless ALGOL was an unspecific language and its abstraction made it little practical to solve habitual tasks.

In 1963 it appeared the CPL (Combined Programming language) with the idea of being more specific for concrete programming tasks of that time than ALGOL. Nevertheless this same specificity made it a very great language and, therefore, difficult to learn and to implement.

In 1967, Martin Richards developed the BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language), that signicated a simplification of the CPL taking the best things that this language offered. But it continued being a very abstract language, that made it portable little but little adapted to the peculiarities of a concrete machine.

In 1970, Ken Thompson, immersed in the development of UNIX at Bell Labs, created the B language. It was a port of BCPL for a specific machine and system (DEC PDP-7 and UNIX), and was adapted to his particular taste and necessities. The final result was a even greater simplification of CPL although dependent on the system. It had great limitations like it did not compile to executable code but threated-code, which generates slower code in execution, and therefore inadequate for the development of an operating system with this language. Reason why from 1971, Denis Ritchie, from the Bell Labs team, began the development of a B compiler whom, among other things, was able to generate executable code directly. This "New B", finally called C, introduced in addition, some other new concepts to the language like data types (char).

Early 1973, Denis Ritchie, had developed the bases of C. The inclusion of types, its handling, as well as the improvement of arrays and pointers, along with later demonstrated capacity of portability without for that reason become a high-level language, contributed to the expansion of the C. It was established with the book "The C Programming Language" by Brian Kernighan and Denis Ritchie, known as White Book, and that served as de facto standard until the publication of formal ANSI standard (ANSI X3J11 committee) in 1989.

Early 1980, Bjarne Stroustrup, from Bell labs, began the development of the C++ language, that would receive formally this name at the end of 1983, when its first manual was going to be published. In October 1985, appeared the first commercial release of the language and the first edition of the book "The C++ Programming Language" by Bjarne Stroustrup.

During the 80s the C++ language was being refined until it became a language with its own personality. All that without practically loss of compatibility in the code neither to resign to its most important characteristics. In fact the ANSI standard for the C language published in 1989 gathered good part of the contributions of C++ to the structured programming.

From 1990, ANSI committee X3J16 began the development of an own standard for C++. In the period passed until the publication of the standard's final draft in November 1997, C++ lived a great expansion in their use and nowadays it is the most used language in the delopment of applications. Also until the publication of the standard, the C++ language has lived great changes and has incorporated new concepts.

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