C++: Evolving toward a more powerful language

Programming languages don't appear by spontaneous generation. Instead, people develop them because they have new ways of thinking about the process of programming and have new types of problems to solve. When we generalize and codify these thought processes, they achieve the status of paradigms, and new languages are created to support those paradigms. The language enables programmers to use the paradigm's power to deliver software of improved quality and lower life-cycle cost. This paper shows how AT&T's C++ language supports several modern programming paradigms to improve software quality and boost productivity. The language is more expressive than C, leads to more maintainable programs, and employs constructs that encourage software reuse and software architecture techniques that deal with complexity in large systems.