The C++ programming language was introduced by Bjarne Stroustrup of the AT&T laboratories in 1985 as an extension of C, with additional features borrowed from the esoteric language Simula. Since then, C++ has grown rapidly in response to the practical need for a programming language that is able to efficiently handle composite and diverse data types. The language implementation is pivoted on the ingenious concept of object oriented programming (OOP). Today, C++ dominates the commercial market and is favored among system programmers and application developers.
Object oriented programming
To illustrate the advantages of an object oriented programming language compared to a structured language such as Matlab, Fortran 77, or C, we assume that an international sports competition has been entered by runners from many countries around the globe. The record of each runner consists of several fields including name, country of origin, city of birth, date of birth, and best performance time.
In a structured language, each one of these fields is normally registered in a separate data vector. In an OOP language, each runner becomes an object defined as a member of the class of runners, and each member is described by the collection of these fields. This formalism allows us to record, recall, and manipulate in any desired way the personal data of each runner using simple symbolic operators. Sub-classes consisting, for example, of runners of a particular nationality can be readily defined to facilitate more detailed manipulations.
An OOP language allows us to introduce a data type of our choice viewed as an object in a defined class, and then use the class as a building block for further development. This flexibility essentially allows us to build a language without building a compiler. In this sense, an OOP language is an ultimate language.
C++ is a generalization of C, but accomplishes much more than C, to the extent that it should be regarded, studied, and taught as a separate language. It is neither necessary nor recommended to study C as a prerequisite of C++, though knowledge of C can be helpful.
