C++

C++ (pronounced see plus plus) is a general purpose programming language. It has imperative, object-oriented and generic programming features, while also providing the facilities for low level memory manipulation. It is designed with a bias for systems programming (e.g. embedded systems, operating system kernels), with performance, efficiency and flexibility of use as its design requirements. C++ has been found also useful in many other contexts, including desktop applications, servers (e.g. e-commerce, web search, SQL) , performance critical applications (e.g. telephone switches, space probes) and entertainment software, such asvideo games. It is a compiled language, with implementations of it available on many platforms. Various organizations provide them, including the FSF, LLVM,Microsoft and Intel. C++ is standardised by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which the latest (and current) having being ratified and published by ISO in September 2011 as ISO/IEC 14882:2011 (informally known as C++11). The C++ programming language was initially standardised in 1998 as ISO/IEC 14882:1998, which was amended by the 2003 technical corrigendum, ISO/IEC 14882:2003. The current standard (C++11) supersedes these, with new features and an enlarged standard library. Before standardization (1989 onwards), C++ was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs, starting in 1979, who wanted an efficient flexible language (like C) that also provided high level features for programme organization. Many other programming languages have been influenced by C++, including C#,Java and newer versions of C (after 1998).

History

Bjarne Stroustrup, a Danish and British trained computer scientist, began his work on C++'s predecessor "C with Classes" in 1979. The motivation for creating a new language originated from Stroustrup's experience in programming for his Ph.D. thesis. Stroustrup found that Simula had features that were very helpful for large software development, but the language was too slow for practical use, while BCPL was fast but too low-level to be suitable for large software development. When Stroustrup started working in AT&T Bell Labs, he had the problem of analyzing the UNIX kernel with respect to distributed computing. Remembering his Ph.D. experience, Stroustrup set out to enhance the C language with Simula-like features. C was chosen because it was general-purpose, fast, portable and widely used. Besides C and Simula's influences, other languages also influenced C++, for example, ALGOL 68, Ada, CLU and ML. At first, the class, derived class, strong typing, inlining, and default argument features were added to C via Stroustrup's "C with Classes" to C compiler, Cpre.

In 1983, it was renamed from C with Classes to C++ (++ being the increment operator in C). New features were added including virtual functions, function name and operator overloading, references, constants, user-controlled free-store memory control, improved type checking, and BCPL style single-line comments with two forward slashes (//), as well as the development of a proper compiler for C++, Cfront. In 1985, the first edition of The C++ Programming Language was released, providing an important reference to the language, as there was not yet an official standard. The first commercial implementation of C++ was released in October of the same year. Release 2.0 of C++ came in 1989 and the updated second edition of The C++ Programming Language was released in 1991. New features included multiple inheritance, abstract classes, static member functions, const member functions, and protected members. In 1990, The Annotated C++ Reference Manual was published. This work became the basis for the future standard. Late feature additions included templates, exceptions, namespaces, new casts, and a Boolean type.

As the C++ language evolved, the standard library evolved with it. The first addition to the C++ standard library was the stream I/O library which provided facilities to replace the traditional C functions such as printf and scanf. Later, among the most significant additions to the standard library, was a large amount of the Standard Template Library.

Make your first program.

# include <iostream>
 
int main()
{
   std::cout << "Hello, world!\n";
}