C++ was developed by Bjarne Stroustrop in 1983 (early 1980’s) at the AT & T Bell laboratories.
Stroustrup became interested in the object oriented approach while studying for his Pd.D at Cambridge university , using Simula 67 to write a distributed systems simulator.
Stroupstrup, an admirer of Simula 67 and a strong supporter of C, wanted to combine the best of both the languages and create a more powerful language that could support object oriented programming features and still retain the power and elegance of C, the result was C++.
C++ is basically a superset of C language.C++ is an extension of C with major addition to the original C language, Stroupstrup initially called the new language ”C WITH CLASSES”. However, later in 1983 the name was changed to C++. The idea of C++ come from the C increment operator “++” thereby suggesting that C++ is an incremented version of C language.
C++ is in many ways a “better C”, and is primarily important for its addition of object orientation. C++ can be used to write procedural code just like C, but its real value/power lies in the ability to write the object oriented programs.
C++ is a superset of C. Most of C applies to C++ also. Therefore, almost all C programs are also C++ programs.
The most important facilities that C++ adds on to C are classes, inheritance, function overloading, and operator overloading. These features enable creating of abstract data types, inherit properties from existing data types and support polymorphism, thereby making C++ an object-oriented language.
The object oriented features in C++ allow programmers to build large programs with clarity, extensibility and ease of maintenance, incorporating the spirit and efficiency of C language.
