History of C++

In 1972, Ken Tompson and Dennis Ritchie created an improved version of the B language, and named it C.

When C started to become an extremely popular language, plenty of companies began to offer their own versions of C. These companies had a different direction in which they were moving the language. No longer could the programmers, using different versions of C, write compatible code. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) solved this problem by creating a subcommittee named X3J11. This committee's purpose was to standardize the C programming language, and so they did. The official standard language name was pronounced ANSI C, or Standard C. It no longer mattered which company's version of C programmers were using, the language features were reliable and available in all existing versions of compiler software that was based on the ANSI C standard specification.


In the coming two years after C was released, the code written in C began to suffer from a problem. As the programmers harnessed the power of Personal Computer, the software grew more complex, and the C programs have gotten longer and longer.

There had to be a solution. In 1983, Bjarne Stroustrup developed such a solution, and named it the C++ programming language.

In 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, the first commercial release of the language appeared as well as the first edition of the book "The C++ Programming Language" by Bjarne Stroustrup.

During the 80s, the C++ language was being refined until it became a language with its own personality. All that with very few losses of compatibility with the code with C, and without resigning to its most important characteristics. In fact, the ANSI standard for the C language published in 1989 took good part of the contributions of C++ to structured programming.

C++ was derived from the original C languages; most programs created in C can still be compiled and run on C++. Howe ever, slight changes in the syntaxes of keywords may prevent some C programs from being executed.