The Design and Evolution of C++ (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This book focuses on the principles, process, and decisions made during the development of the C++ programming language. As the "inventor" of the language, Stroustrup presents his unique insight into the decisions which resulted in the features of C++--the universally praised, the controversial, and even some of the rejected ones. The book provides a solid introduction to OOP and C++ for beginners.

From the Inside Flap

"He who does not plow, must write."
--Martin A. Hansen

The ACM HOPL-2 conference on the History of Programming Languages asked me to write a paper on the history of C++. This seemed a reasonable idea and a bit of an honor, so I started writing. To get a more comprehensive and balanced view of C++'s growth, I asked a few friends from the early days of C++ for their recollections. That caused news of this project to travel through the grapevine. There, the story mutated, and one day I received a message from a friend asking where he could buy my new book on the design of C++. That email message is the real origin of this book.

Traditional books about programming and programming languages explain what a language is and how to use it. However, many people are also curious about why a language is the way it is and how it came to be that way. This book answers these last two questions for C++. It explains how C++ evolved from its first design to the language in use today. It describes the key problems, design aims, language ideas, and constraints that shaped C++, and how they changed over time.

Naturally, C++ and the ideas about design and programming that shaped it didn't just mutate by themselves. What really evolved was the C++ users' understanding of their practical problems and of the tools needed to help solve them. Consequently, this book also traces the key problems tackled using C++ and the views of the people who tackled them in ways that influenced C++.

C++ is still a young language. Some of the issues discussed here are yet unknown to many users. Many implications of decisions described here will not become obvious for years to come. This book presents my view of how C++ came about, what it is, and what it ought to be. I hope this will be of help to people trying to understand how best to use C++ and in the continuing evolution of C++.

The emphasis is on the overall design goals, practical constraints, and people that shaped C++. The key design decisions relating to language features are discussed and put into their historical context. The evolution of C++ is traced from C with Classes through Release 1.0 and 2.0 to the current ANSI/ISO standards work and the explosion of use, interest, commercial activity, compilers, tools, environments, and libraries. C++'s relationship to C and Simula is discussed in detail. C++'s relationship to other languages is discussed briefly. The design of major language facilities such as classes, inheritance, abstract classes, overloading, memory management, templates, exception handling, run-time type information, and namespaces are discussed in some detail.

The primary aim of this book is to give C++ programmers a better idea of the background and fundamental concepts of their language and hopefully to inspire them to experiment with ways of using C++ that are new to them. This book can also be read by experienced programmers and students of programming languages and might help them decide whether using C++ might be worth their while. Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Steve Clamage, Tony Hansen, Lorraine Juhl, Peter Juhl, Brian Kernighan, Lee Knight, Doug Lea, Doug McIlroy, Barbara Moo, Jens Palsberg, Steve Rumsby, and Christopher Skelly for reading complete drafts of this book. Their constructive comments caused major changes to the contents and organization of this book. Steve Buroff, Martin Carroll, Sean Corfield, Tom Hagelskjær, Rick Hollinbeck, Dennis Mancl, and Stan Lippman helped by commenting on selected chapters. Also, thanks to Archie Lachner for asking for this book before I had thought of writing it.

Naturally, I owe thanks to the many people who helped make C++. In a sense, this book is a tribute to them and some of their names can be found throughout the chapters and in the index. Should I single out individuals, it must be Brian Kernighan, Andrew Koenig, Doug McIlroy, and Jonathan Shopiro, each of whom has been a steady source of help, encouragement, and ideas for more than a decade. Also, thanks to Kristen Nygaard and Dennis Ritchie as the designers of Simula and C from which the key ingredients of C++ were borrowed. Over the years, I have come to appreciate them not only as brilliant and practical language designers, but also as gentlemen and thoroughly likable individuals.

Bjarne Stroustrup
Murray Hill, New Jersey

0201543303P04062001

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (April 8, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201543303
• ISBN-13: 978-0201543308
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #62,059 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Required reading before making a suggestion for C++ additons, August 29, 2000

By	G. Powell (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is probably the most well written B. Stroustrup book. Without dwelling too much on the arcane, Bjarne goes over all of the reasons for the additions to the "C" language to create C++. Bjarne comes off as a guy just trying to get a job done and yet do what is right for the rest of the programming community. Its a nice change from the almost religious furor discussions that occurr on USNET.

There are still open issues among the users of C++, people who want a feature found in another language, or wish that their personal idea would be incorporated into the general language. Before posting a proposal to comp.std.c++ you should read this book. There you will most likely find a discussion on the idea and why it is either not implemented, or was rejected. Then you can organize your counter argument without wasting everyone's time. (Also one of the first counter posts will be a citation to this book.) It's not that C++ is the perfect language, it isn't, after all my pet idea of overloading operator.() was rejected, but in ammending the ISO99 C++ standard you need to know what has already been discussed. So we can go forward without rehashing.

Intermediate C++ programmers would also benefit from the discussions on casting, use of private/public/protected inheritence and scoping, and exceptions. Bjarne goes over why these things changed over time and what problems these features are intended to solve.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If only more languages had a book like this..., July 25, 2002

By	Douglas Welzel (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

While this title probably won't help your development skill, it provides a great deal of insight into the design of C++. Parts of C++ may seem a bit odd (crufty, overly complex, however you want to think of it). In this book Stroustrup clearly explains the motivations and tradeoffs that went into every feature of the language. While you may not agree with the decisions, understanding the thought process behind them is incredibly interesting and will give you a better appreciation for the language.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the story behind C++, October 20, 2002

By	Sören Meyer-Eppler (Havixbeck Deutschland) - See all my reviews

This book is very interesting in that it doesn't tell you how to program in C++ but rather highlights why C++ is the way it is today. It starts with the very roots, an extension to the C language ('C with classes'') Bjarne devised back in 1979, because he faced a software engineering problem at the time where all currently available tools seemed inappropriate. This highly real world oriented design attitude was kept throughout the evolution of C++ - Bjarne specifically didn't want to produce an 'academic' language. This view and the absolute necessity for C compatibility and efficiency explain lots, if not all, of C++s more ugly syntactic and semantic constructs. While the book has chapters dealing with very specific parts of the language, I found the philosophical chapters the most interesting. These explain the author's personal views on programming and design in general and consequently why certain things were accepted or rejected into C++. Bjarne stresses the point that C++ was designed from the beginning to be a 'multiple paradigm' language. Object oriented programming was never meant to be, and is not, the only valid - holy grail - style of programming, that many make it out to be. It's quite frustrating to see features devised ten years ago still not properly supported by the current crop of compilers, templates for example (export anyone?).
The book is not for the novice programmer, but for the experienced C++ user who wants to know the whys behind the language. While a novice might be interested in that information too, it is not an advisable lecture for those readers, since they might easily get confused with the source code examples showing directions in which C++ did not evolve.
To quote one of the design goals: 'C++ is a general-purpose language designed to make programming more enjoyable for the serious programmer' - I think it succeeded.