What is C++?

C++ is an object oriented programming language. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA, in the early 1980’s. Stroustrup, an admirer of Simula67 and a strong supporter of C, wanted to combine the best of 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++. Therefore, C++ is an extension of C with a major addition of the class construct feature of Simula67. Since the class was a major addition of the class construct feature of Simula67. Since the class was a major addition to the original C language, Stroustrup initially called the new language ‘C with classes’. However, later in 1983, the name was changed to C++. The idea of C++ comes from the C increment operator ++, thereby suggesting that C++ is an augmented (incremented) version of C.
During the early 1990’s the language underwent a number of improvements and changes. In November 1997, the ANSI/ISO standards committee standardized. These changes and several new features were added to the language specifications. C++ is a superset of C. Most of what we already know about C applies to C++ also. Therefore, almost all C programs are also C++ programs. However, there are few minor differences that will prevent C programs to run under C++ compiler. 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++ a truly 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. the addition of new features has transformed C from a language that currently facilitates top- down, structured design, to one that provides bottom up, object oriented design.