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Return to Design and Evolution of C++ (D&E) by Bjarne Stroustrup

Writing is the only art that must he learned by wrote. – anon

Main themes of this book — how to read this book — a timeline for C++ — C++ and other programming languages — references.

Introduction

C++ was designed to provide Simula’s facilities for program organization together with C’s efficiency and flexibility for systems programming. It was intended to deliver that to real projects within half a year of the idea. It succeeded.

At the time, mid-1979, neither the modesty nor the preposterousness of that goal was realized. The goal was modest in that it did not involve innovation, and preposterous in both its time scale and its Draconian demands on efficiency and flexibility. While a modest amount of innovation did emerge over the years, efficiency and flexibility have been maintained without compromise. While the goals for C++ have been refined, elaborated, and made more explicit over the years, C++ as used today directly reflects its original aims.

The purpose of this book is to document those aims, track their evolution, and present C++ as it emerged from the efforts of many people to create a language that served its users according to those aims. In doing so, I try to balance historical facts (such as names, places, and events) against technical issues of language design, implementation, and use. It is not my aim to document every little event, but to focus on the key events, ideas, and trends that actually influenced the definition of C++ or might influence its further evolution and use.

Wherever events are presented, I try to describe them as they happened rather than how I or others might have liked them to have happened. Where reasonable, I use quotes from papers to illustrate the aims, principles, and features as they appeared at the time. I try not to project hindsight into events; rather, retrospective comments and comments about the implications of a decision are presented separately and are explicitly marked as retrospective. Basically, I abhor revisionist history and try to avoid it. For example, I mention that “I had found Pascal’s type system worse than useless – a straitjacket that caused more problems than it solved by forcing me to warp my designs to suit an implementation-oriented artifact.” That I thought that at the time is a fact, and it is a fact that had important implications for the evolution of C++. Whether that harsh judgement on Pascal was fair and whether I would make the same judgement today (more than a decade later) is irrelevant. I could not delete the fact (say, to spare the feelings of Pascal fans or to spare myself embarrassment or controversy) or modify it (by providing a more complete and balanced view) without warping the history of C++.

I try to mention people who contributed to the design and evolution of C++, and I try to be specific about their contribution and about when it occurred. This is somewhat hazardous. Since I don’t have a perfect memory, I will overlook some contributions. I offer my apologies. I name the people who caused a decision to be made for C++. Inevitably, these will not always be the people who first encountered a particular problem or who first thought of a solution. This can be unfortunate, but to be vague or to refrain from mentioning names would be worse. Feel free to send me information that might help clarify such points.

Where I describe historical events, there is a question of how objective my descriptions are. I have tried to compensate for unavoidable bias by obtaining information about events I wasn’t part of, by talking to other people involved in events, and by having several of the people involved in the evolution of C++ read this book. Their names can be found at the end of the preface. In addition, the History of Programming Languages (HOPL-2) paper [Stroustrup,1993] that contains the central historical facts from this book was extensively reviewed and deemed free of unsuitable bias.

Fair Use Sources:

• BS D&E, 1994