C with Classes

This is the genealogy of the programming language C with Classes:

C with Classes is a child of C and Simula.
C with Classes was born in year 1980.
Then it begat C++ in year 1983.

This genealogy is brought to you by the Programming Languages Genealogy Project.

C with Classes was Bjarne Stroustrup's early experiment with an Object Orientated C-derived language. He was told to "Do something interesting" as a research project at the Computer Science Research Department of Bell Labs, and C with Classes was the output. The goal of C with Classes was to allow better organization of C programs, while not compromising run-time performance - and still do everything C did (and more!).

C with Classes was nearly 100% source-compatible with C, but there were some differences. For instance, new and class were (and are) legal identifiers in C, but are keywords in C with Classes. It was, however, 100% link compatible - C with Classes functions could be called from C programs, and vice versa.

The initial features of C with Classes, in the 1980 release, were:

• Classes.
• Derived classes (no virtual functions yet)
• Access control via the public and private statements.
• Constructors and Destructors.
• Call and return functions.
• friend classes.
• Type checking and conversation of function arguments.

In 1981, the following features were added:

• Inline functions.
• Overloading of the assignment operator.
• Default arguments.

As you can see, if you are familiar with C++, many of the features of the langauge were present in this early release. The language retained the full power of C.

The syntax of C with Classes was very similar to that of C++ today, although during the course of C with Classes' life Bjarne considered changing some of the more awkward C syntax, he eventually withdrew when put under fire by users.