History of C++

During 1960s, while the computers were on the first stage of their, many new low level as well as high level programming languages were appeared. Among all of these languages, ALGOL 60, which was developed as an alternative to the FORTRAN but by taking some concepts of data structured programming (DSA) from it would later put some inspiration on most of the procedural languages, such as CPL and its successor (like C++). In 1963 the Combined Programming language (CPL) appeared with an idea of being more specific especially for concrete programming tasks of that time than the ALGOL or FORTRAN. Nevertheless this specificity made this language (CPL) a big and popular language and, therefore a bit difficult to learn as well as to implement.

In the year of 1970 Ken Thompson created the B language at Bell Labs during the development of UNIX. B language was a port of BCPL made for specific machines and systems say DEC PDP-7 and UNIX. The final BCPL was even more efficient than CPL but was system dependent. BCPL had great limitations, like it did not compile the executable codes but threaded codes and possess slower execution speed, and it was not adequate for the development of operating systems. Therefore, from 1971 onward, Dennis Ritchie, from the team of Bell Labs, began the development of B compiler which was able to generate an executable code directly. "New B Language", finally called as C language, introducing some other new concepts like data types (characters) to the language.

In 1973, Dennis Ritchie, had developed the basis of C language. The inclusion of its handling, types as well as improvement of the arrays and pointers along with the later demonstrated capacities of portability without becoming high level language, which contributed in the expansion of C language. C was established with the book named as "The C Programming Language" by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan, also known as the White Book. Bjarne Stroustrup, from the Bell labs, started the development of the C++ language in 1980. In October 1985, first commercial release of C language appeared as well as the very first edition of the book "The C++ Programming Language" by Bjarne Stroustrup was published. Since then C++ language has been evolving, and new version of standard C++ that is C++09, was developed and published in the year 2009 having several new features.