Language arose in the early 1980's, when the employee of the company Bell Laboratories Bjarne Stroustrup invented a number of improvements to the C programming language to suit your needs. Prior to the official standardization of the language has developed mainly by Stroustrup in response to requests of programming community. In 1998, was ratified by the international standard language of C++: ISO / IEC 14882:1998 «Standard for the C++ Programming Language»; after making technical corrections to the standard in 2003 - the current version of the standard - ISO / IEC 14882:2003.
Early versions of the language, known under the name «C with classes" began to appear in 1980. The idea of creating a new language originated from Stroustrup's experience programming for the dissertation. It found that the simulation language Simula (Simula) has features that would be very helpful for the development of large software, but works too slowly. At the same time, the language BCPL fast enough, but too close to the low-level language and is not suitable for the development of large software. Stroustrup started working in Bell Labs over the tasks of queuing theory (in the annex to the modeling of telephone calls). Attempts to use existing at the time of modeling languages have been ineffective. Recalling the experience of his thesis, Stroustrup decided to add the C language (the successor to BCPL) opportunities available in the language Simula. C Language, as a basic language of UNIX, at which a computer works Bell, is a fast, versatile and portable. Stroustrup added to it to work with classes and objects. As a result, the practical problem of modeling were available for solutions, both in terms of development time (due to the use of Simula-like classes) and in terms of computation time (due to the rapidity of Cu). At the beginning of C were added to classes (with encapsulation), a derived class, strong type checking, inline-functions and default arguments.
Developing C with classes (later C++), Stroustrup also wrote a program cfront - translator which transforms the source code of C with classes in the source code of a simple Cu. The new language, unexpected for the author, gained great popularity among his colleagues and soon Stroustrup could not personally support it, responding to thousands of questions.
In 1983, there was the renaming of the C language with classes in C++. In addition, it has added new capabilities such as virtual functions, overloading functions and operators, references, constants, user control over the administration of free memory, an improved type checking, and a new style of comments (//). His first commercial release in October 1985. In 1985 he published the first edition of "Programming Language C++», providing the first description of the language that was extremely important because of the lack of an official standard. In 1989 he took out C++ version 2.0. Its new features include multiple inheritance, abstract classes, static member functions, constant functions, and protected members.
In 1990 came "commented a guide to C++», then posited as the basis of the standard. Recent updates included templates, exceptions, namespaces, new ways of casting and a Boolean type.
Standard C++ library also evolved with it. The first addition to the standard library C++ have input / output streams, providing a means to replace the traditional C functions printf and scanf. Later, the most significant development of the standard library was the inclusion of a standard template library.
After many years of joint ANSI-ISO committee standardized C++ in 1998 (ISO / IEC 14882:1998 - Programming Language C++). Within a few years after the official release of the standard committee handles error messages and eventually released a revised version of the standard C++ in 2003. Currently, the working group ISO (ISO) is working on a new version of the standard, code-named C++0 x (formerly known as C++09).
Nobody has the rights to the language , it is free. However, the document standard language (except for drafts) is available free of charge.
