History of C++
During the 60s appeared some new programming like ALGOL 60 that gathered from FORTRAN the concepts of structured programming which finally would be used by CPL and its successors (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 Compiled 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.
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.
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.
From 1990, ANSI committee 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 development of applications. Also until the publication of the standard, the C++ language has lived great changes and has incorporated new concepts.
Why C++?
C++ has certain characteristics over other programming languages. Most remarkable are:
Object-oriented programming
The possibility to orientate programming to objects allows the programmer to design applications from a point of view more like a communication between objects that on a structured sequence of code. In addition it allows the reusability of code in a more logical and productive way.
Portability
You can practically compile the same C++ code in almost any type of computer and operating system without making changes. C++ is one of the most used and ported to different platforms programming language.
Brevity
Code written in C++ is very short in comparison with other languages, since the use of special characters is preferred before key words, saving effort (and prolonging the life of our keyboards).
Modular programming
An application’s body in C++ can be made up of several source code files that are compiled separately and then linked together. Saving time since it is not needed to recompile the complete application when making a single change but only the file that contains it. In addition, this characteristic allows to link C++ code produced in other languages like Assembler or C.
C Compatibility
Any code written in C can easily be included in a C++ program without making changes.
Speed
The resulting code from a C++ compilation is very efficient, due indeed to its duality as high-level and low-level language and to the reduced size of the language itself.
The words to the text:
to gather собирать
successor преемник
specificity специфичность
therefore поэтому, следовательно
to implement выполнять
array множество
manual справочник, руководство
to incorporate присоединять
sequence ряд
reusability повторное использование
brevity краткость
to link связывать, соединять
to contain содержать
duality двойственность
