Introduction to C++ Programming:-

C++ is the latest in a proud family of languages. Its origins can be traced back to a language called BCPL. BCPL was developed at Cambridge University in the late 1960s as an alternative to FORTRAN. BCPL was developed by Martin Richards while he was visiting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); it became widely used by those working on the new Unix operating system there.

A more direct ancestor can be found in the B language, also developed at MIT in the late 1960s and early 1970s. B was designed as a programming language for developing systems on Unix, which was yet another project being developed at MIT. B was developed, extended and refined and eventually evolved into a new language, imaginatively named C. C was first fully described in The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie in 1978. C became one of the most popular programming languages, if not the most popular, in the 1980s and 1990s.

C++ is essentially a development of C with extensions to support something called object-oriented programming. It was first proposed by Bjarne Stroustrup in the early 1980s. Stroustrup was influenced by Simula and wanted to extend C to include object-oriented facilities. C++ offers significant advantages over C for many applications, although even Stroustrup himself has remarked that C is to be preferred in some areas. The key is choice: C++ can be used as an object-oriented language or it can be used in a more traditional, C-like, way. This flexibility means that C++ is now one of the most popular programming languages in a whole range of applications. C++ is the current descendant of a long line of languages. It draws from C and Simula, both of which were first developed some thirty years ago. In doing this it also draws influences from all the other languages that have gone before. Lady Ada Lovelace wouldn’t recognise C++, of course, but some of the very basic ideas that she first proposed for Babbage’s Analytical Engine are still in there.