Chapter     1

Beginning C++

The C++ programming language was designed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs, beginning in 1979. The goal of the language was to provide useful features from other languages of the time, such as Simula, with faster runtime performance. C was chosen as the basis for this new language due to its execution speed, portability, and wide adoption.

The first major extension Stroustrup added to C was class support. Classes allowed a new programming paradigm to be used with C: object-oriented programming (OOP). Stroustrup’s new language quickly became known as C with Classes, eventually changed to C++ in 1983.

C++ has been in continual development since its inception. New features were added regularly throughout the 1980s and ...

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