In the early 1970s, Dennis Ritchie of Bell Laboratories
was engaged in a project to develop a new operating system. Ritchie
discovered that in order to accomplish his task he needed the use of a programming
language that was concise and that produced compact and speedy programs.
This need led Ritchie to develop the programming language called C.
In the early 1980's, also at Bell Laboratories, another programming language
was created which was based upon the C language. This new
language was developed by
Bjarne
Stroustrup and was called C++. Stroustrup states that the purpose of C++ is
to make writing good programs easier and more pleasant for the individual
programmer. When he designed C++, he added OOP (Object Oriented
Programming) features to C without significantly changing the C
component. Thus C++ is a "relative" (called a superset) of C, meaning that any valid C
program is also a valid C++ program.
There are several
versions of the C++ language, of which Visual C++ is only one. Other
dialects include Borland C++, Turbo C++, and Code Warrior (Mac). All
of these software packages enable you to create computer programs with
C++, but they all implement the C++ language in a slightly different
manner. In an attempt to maintain portability of both the C and C++
languages, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a
standard of consistency for C and C++ programming. While we will be
working primarily with this ANSI standard, we will also be examining the idiosyncrasies
of Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0.
Note: Due to their power
and ease of use, C and C++ were used
in the programming of the special effects for
Star Wars.
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