Bjarne Stroustrup: When I started—in 1979—my purpose was to help programmers build systems. It still is. To provide genuine help in solving a problem, rather than being just an academic exercise, a language must be complete for the application domain. That is, a non-research language exists to solve a problem. The problems I was addressing related to operating system design, networking, and simulation. I—and my colleagues— needed a language that could express program organization as could be done in Simula (that’s what people tend to call object-oriented programming), but also write efficient low-level code, as could be done in C. No language that could do both existed in 1979, or I would have used it. I didn’t particularly want to design a new programming language; I just wanted to help solve a few problems.
Given that, building on an existing language makes a lot of sense. From the base language, you get a basic syntactic and semantic structure, you get useful libraries, and you become part of a culture. Had I not built on C, I would have based C++ on some other language. Why C? I had Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, and other Unix greats just down (or across) the hall from me in Bell Labs’ Computer Science Research Center, so the question may seem redundant. But it was a question I took seriously.
In particular, C’s type system was informal and weakly enforced (as Dennis Ritchie said,
“C is a strongly typed, weakly checked language”). The “weakly checked” part worried me and causes problems for C++ programmers to this day. Also, C wasn’t the widely used language it is today. Basing C++ on C was an expression of faith in the model of computation that underlies C (the “strongly typed” part) and an expression of trust in my colleagues. The choice was made based on knowledge of most higher-level programming languages used for systems programming at the time (both as a user and as an implementer). It is worth remembering that this was a time when most work “close to the hardware” and requiring serious performance was still done in assembler. Unix was a major breakthrough in many ways, including its use of C for even the most demanding systems programming tasks.
So, I chose C’s basic model of the machine over better-checked type systems. What I really wanted as the framework for programs was Simula’s classes, so I mapped those into the C model of memory and computation. The result was something that was extremely expressive and flexible, yet ran at a speed that challenged assembler without a massive runtime support system.
Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming
Given that, building on an existing language makes a lot of sense. From the base language, you get a basic syntactic and semantic structure, you get useful libraries, and you become part of a culture. Had I not built on C, I would have based C++ on some other language. Why C? I had Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, and other Unix greats just down (or across) the hall from me in Bell Labs’ Computer Science Research Center, so the question may seem redundant. But it was a question I took seriously.
In particular, C’s type system was informal and weakly enforced (as Dennis Ritchie said,
“C is a strongly typed, weakly checked language”). The “weakly checked” part worried me and causes problems for C++ programmers to this day. Also, C wasn’t the widely used language it is today. Basing C++ on C was an expression of faith in the model of computation that underlies C (the “strongly typed” part) and an expression of trust in my colleagues. The choice was made based on knowledge of most higher-level programming languages used for systems programming at the time (both as a user and as an implementer). It is worth remembering that this was a time when most work “close to the hardware” and requiring serious performance was still done in assembler. Unix was a major breakthrough in many ways, including its use of C for even the most demanding systems programming tasks.
So, I chose C’s basic model of the machine over better-checked type systems. What I really wanted as the framework for programs was Simula’s classes, so I mapped those into the C model of memory and computation. The result was something that was extremely expressive and flexible, yet ran at a speed that challenged assembler without a massive runtime support system.
Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming
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