C++ is a programming language developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories by Bjarne Stroustrup [17] in the early 1980's. The language was designed with the intent of merging the efficiency and conciseness of C with the object-oriented programming features of SIMULA-67. Since its creation, the language has evolved rapidly and several new features have been added since its initial release in 1985. The language also promises to provide support for several other useful mechanisms such as parameterized types and exception handling in the near future. A formal ANSI-C++ committee (X3J16) has since been established to help develop an accurate and reliable standard for the language which should eliminate most, if not all, ambiguities in the C++ compilers and translators of today. It is expected that this committee will adopt most of the rules present in the ANSI base document The Annotated C++ Reference Manual as written by Ellis and Stroustrup [6]
With a few modest exceptions, C++ can be considered a superset of the C programming language. While C++ is similar to C in syntax and structure, it is important to realize that the two languages are radically different. Comparing C to C++ is like comparing checkers to chess. Although both games are played on the same board, one must realize that the game of chess cannot be played using the same strategy as that used in the game of checkers. C++ and its support for object-oriented programming provide a new methodology for designing, implementing and ease of maintaining software projects which C, a structured programming language, is unable to support.
Extensive libraries are available for the C programming language; consequently, a deliberate effort was made on behalf of the developers of C++ to maintain backward compatibility with C. Any major deviation from the C programming language would have meant that all the libraries available for C would have to be tediously rewritten for C++. This would have severely limited the usefulness of C++ in an environment where C libraries were used extensively.