The news of C++

C++, this world opened up for me only in the mid of 2000, almost 10 years [#woo.. I did not realise it was 10 years till i just recollected it was 2000], was started way back in 1983 by Bjarne Stroustrup [#not born then]. It was predominantly C until then [#although many other languages did exist], thanks to simula and Stroustrup,C ++ was born. It introduced OOPS and came with it, a lot of features encapsulation, abstraction, polymorphism, inheritance and modularity [#these are the ones I remember]. Those were concepts, the language per say had new programming constructs, keywords, etc... example: class, templates[# Please excuse, if templates were not part of C++ earlier], enum, private(all 3 Ps), friend, etc and one important thing... guess what? ... its backward compatibility with its predecessor C [#debatable on good or bad].

Now time for standards, Around 1998, ISO C++ working group introduced a standard called C++98 [#today, most of the compilers support this]. It had defects and were fixed by 2003. Typically around this time (may be little earlier, 2001), a need was felt for a host of new extensions and improvisations to the existing C++, the most successful and popular C++ libraries -- Boost (a good part of it was just macros, meaning just a few header files :)), plugged most of the holes in the standard C++. Realizing this, a technical report was prepared by the standards comittee called C++ Technical Report (popularly known as TR1, careful, its a PDF) which had suggestions similar to boost library [#mostly stolen from boost :P]. But, But, But, TR1 was not a standard, but a draft which compilers could implement. (I think VS2008 implemented TR1 under the namespace std::tr1)

A very recent development, not yet released [#but still, lots of blogs on it], next version of C++ standard, C > C++ > C+=2? [#people would kill me for this :P] its called C++-0x , and would be published by the end of 2011... We will not be getting to use the new additions till few more years?? ... draft needs to be released, published, implementors analyse and implement into compilers, libraries, ..... Nah Nah..! Most of implementors have already begun work on this! As most of these additions were specified in TR1, the game is already ON. [# I always dreamed of using the C++ language to its boundaries, now with the boundaries expanding, i am left with a :x ]