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The Evolution of C++ as a Programming Language Essay

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The Evolution of C++ as a Programming Language

C++ is a very useful programming language. Many educational curriculums will include either C or C++ as the tool entry-level programmers will use to learn the syntax, semantics, and data structures key to effective programming that is required of computer scientists. C++ is such a diverse language, one cannot help but wonder how it became the popular language it is today, and this paper is going to demonstrate just that.

Introduction to CPL

Cis the great-grandfather of C++, designed in 1963. It is short for “Combined Programming Language.” Many features within CPL are from, or are largely based on, Algol 60, which was a programming language developed in the early 1960’s. It was …show more content…

CPL uses standard operators and conditional statements, as well as loops called cycles, and is capable of evaluating expressions in both “right-hand” and “left-hand” modes, meaning it evaluates one side of an expression first before the other. CPL also supports the use of a “compound command,” using a special symbol §.

Brought forth from CPL was the concept of an “initialization definition,” which assigns a variable as it is defined a value obtained by referencing an array using an index or from evaluating an expression that may or may not need to be re-evaluated each time the variable is used. Also, CPL allowed labeled (more recently referred to as a pointer) definitions to be defined and referenced at any time, instead of having to be limited to the whole block of code, as in Algol.

Functions with parameters enclosed in brackets are used for complex computations in which the variables or constants used in the assignment expression must correspond in data type. Arrays and lists, like in LISP, are also declarable data types.

From CPL to BCPL

Much of CPL described above may seem foreign to modern programmers that use C and C++, although quite a few of the features should have been familiar. In BCPL, there are several differences in coding, although the core of the language is still the same.

As CPL was designed in part by the University of Cambridge,

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