History of C++

History of C+

The creation of C++ was first put into motion in 1979 by its creator Bjarne Stroustrup. Bjarne was working on his PhD thesis at Cambridge University. He was using a large and detailed simulator, that he had written in Simula, to simulate running software over a network of computers. He found programming in Simula enjoyable and was impressed by how the programs class structure helped him organize his code. As the size of his program increased, he found that the language became increasingly more helpful.

Simula’s class structure allowed him to organize his program as a collection of smaller programs, which made programs easier to read, write, debug, and maintain. However, when it came to the implementation of his Simula program, his project nearly ended in disaster. “It took longer to compile 1/30th of the program and link it to a precompiled version of the rest than it took to compile and link the program as a monolith”(Stroustrup, 1993, p. 3). The runtime of the program was simply unacceptable; to keep from having to scrap the project Stroustrup rewrote his simulator in BCPL (an early version of C). Stroustrup had a horrible experience programming in BCPL, however the simulator did run at acceptable speeds. Stroustrup vowed never again to take a project with inadequate programming tools. As a result, Stroustrup began working on a new programming language that combined the Object oriented features of Simula67 and the flexibility and efficiency of C. Stroustrup first developed a newer version of C, which he called C with Classes. (Stroustrup, 1993)

In 1982 the developer of the C programming language realized that C with Classes had been somewhat successful in that C with Classes was useful enough to the programming community that they would pay for the language and the developer but not so useful that they would pay for a support and development organization (Stroustrup 1993). Because of this the developer was convinced that the only way out of this dilemma was to either stop supporting C with Classes so that the users would go elsewhere or develop a new and better language based on his experience with C with Classes that would serve a larger user base who would pay for a support and development organization (Stroustrup 1993). Increasing the user population via marketing never occurred to the developer as a possible third option and thus what would soon be called C++, was born (Stroustrup 1993).

Stroustrup began designing a cleaned-up and extended successor to C with Classes and implemented the language using traditional compiler technology. At first he still called the language C with Classes but gave the language the name C84 after a request from his management. This name only lasted a few months and after asking for ideas Stroustrup chose C++, which was suggested by Rick Mascitti, because