During the 60s appeared some new programming languages, like ALGOL 60 that
gathered from FORTRAN the concepts of structured programming which finally
would be used by CPL and its successors (like C++).
Later ALGOL 68 also influenced directly in the development of data types in C.
Nevertheless ALGOL was an unspecific language and its abstraction made
it little practical to solve habitual tasks.
In 1963 it appeared the CPL (Combined Programming language) with the idea of being
more specific for concrete programming tasks of that time than ALGOL.
Nevertheless this same specificity made it a very great language and, therefore,
difficult to learn and to implement.
In 1967, Martin Richards developed the BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language),
that signicated a simplification of the CPL taking the best things that this
language offered. But it continued being a very abstract language, that made
it portable little but little adapted to the peculiarities of a concrete machine.
In 1970, Ken Thompson, immersed in the development of UNIX at Bell Labs, created
the B language. It was a port of BCPL for a specific machine and system
(DEC PDP-7 and UNIX), and was adapted to his particular taste and necessities.
The final result was a even greater simplification of CPL although dependent
on the system. It had great limitations like it did not compile to executable code
but threaded-code, which generates slower code in execution, and therefore
inadequate for the development of an operating system with this language.
Reason why from 1971, Denis Ritchie, from the Bell Labs team, began the
development of a B compiler whom, among other things, was able to generate
executable code directly. This "New B", finally called C, introduced in addition,
some other new concepts to the language like data types (char).
Early 1973, Denis Ritchie, had developed the bases of C. The inclusion of types,
its handling, as well as the improvement of arrays and pointers, along with later
demonstrated capacity of portability without for that reason become a high-level
language, contributed to the expansion of the C. It was established with the book
"The C Programming Language" by Brian Kernighan and Denis Ritchie, known as White
Book, and that served as de facto standard until the publication of formal ANSI standard
(ANSI X3J11 committee) in 1989.
Early 1980, Bjarne Stroustrup, from Bell labs, began the development of the C++ language,
that would receive formally this name at the end of 1983, when its first manual
was going to be published. In October 1985, appeared the first commercial release
of the language and the first edition of the book
"The C++ Programming Language" by Bjarne Stroustrup.
During the 80's the C++ language was being refined until it became a language with
its own personality. All that without practically loss of compatibility in the code
neither to resign to its most important characteristics. In fact the ANSI standard
for the C language published in 1989 gathered good part of the contributions of C++
to the structured programming.
From 1990, ANSI committee X3J16 began the development of an own standard for C++.
In the period passed until the publication of the standard's final draft in November 1997,
C++ lived a great expansion in their use and nowadays it is the most used language
in the development of applications. Also until the publication of the standard, the C++ language
has lived great changes and has incorporated new concepts.
Courtesy:
www.cpluscplus.com
