C++ was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup of AT&T Bell Laboratories in the early 1980's, and is based on the C language. The name is a pun - "++" is a syntactic construct used in C (to increment a variable), and C++ is intended as an incremental improvement of C. Most of C is a subset of C++, so that most C programs can be compiled (i.e. converted into a series of low-level instructions that the computer can execute directly) using a C++ compiler.

C is in many ways hard to categorise. Compared to assembly language it is high-level, but it nevertheless includes many low-level facilities to directly manipulate the computer's memory. It is therefore an excellent language for writing efficient "systems" programs. But for other types of programs, C code can be hard to understand, and C programs can therefore be particularly prone to certain types of error. The extra object-oriented facilities in C++ are partly included to overcome these shortcomings.

The American National Standards Institution (ANSI) provides "official" and generally accepted standard definitions of many programming languages, including C and C++. Such standards are important. A program written only in ANSI C++ is guaranteed to run on any computer whose supporting software conforms to the ANSI standard. In other words, the standard guarantees that ANSI C++ programs are portable. In practice most versions of C++ include ANSI C++ as a core language, but also include extra machine-dependent features to allow smooth interaction with different computers' operating systems. These machine dependent features should be used sparingly. Moreover, when parts of a C++ program use non-ANSI components of the language, these should be clearly marked, and as far a possible separated from the rest of the program, so as to make modification of the program for different machines and operating systems as easy as possible.

The best way to learn a programming language is to try writing programs and test them on a computer. To do this, we need several pieces of software:

• An editor with which to write and modify the C++ program components or source code,
• A compiler with which to convert the source code into machine instructions which can be executed by the computer directly,
• A linking program with which to link the compiled program components with each other and with a selection of routines from existing libraries of computer code, in order to form the complete machine-executable object program,
• A debugger to help diagnose problems, either in compiling programs in the first place, or if the object program runs but gives unintended results.

There are several editors available for Linux (and Unix systems in general). Two of the most popular editors are emacs and vi. For the compiler and linker, we will be using the GNU g++ compiler/linker, and for the debugger we will be using the GNU debugger gdb.

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Deepak Kumar Tala - All rights reserved

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