Origins of C and C++

Dennis Ritchie of the Bell Labs designed the C, a general purpose computer programming language in 1972 for use with UNIX, an operating system of then. C is predominantly used for system software programming, but is also very useful for creating general application software. Some of the adjectives used to describe C are block structured, imperative & procedural language.

C++(originally named "C with Classes" and still known as the superstructure of C in computer circles) was developed as an enhancement of C by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1983 at the Bell Labs. Stroustrup, in 1979, started by adding classes, virtual functions, operator overloading, multiple inheritance, templates, exception handling etc. The C++ programming language standard was ratified as ISO/IEC 14882:1998 in 1998 and the current version is the 2003 version, ISO/IEC 14882:2003 which is infact the corrected version of the C++ 1998. The "Library Technical Report 1", released in 2005 gives details of extensions to the standard library without being a part of the standar version. A new version of the standard (informally known as C++0x) is under development. C++ has been a highly successful commercial programming language since 1990. Though C++ is royalty-free, its documentation is not freely available.