The Miseducation of C++

• Early C++: The first public incarnation of the language formed part of a growing interest in the use of object-oriented development in industry. Early C++ was a minimal language, extending C with a stronger type system, and the notion of classes with public and private access, single inheritance and operator overloading.

• Classic C++: This is the C++ that many long-time C++ programmers know, and many new C++ programmers are still effectively being taught. It brought abstract classes, multiple inheritance and further refinements into the language. Classic C++ also introduced templates and exceptions, although they took longer to mature than other, more obviously evolutionary features. Where templates are used, it’s normally to articulate container classes and smart pointers. Classic C++ saw the greatest proliferation in dialects as it was in this period that the language underwent standardisation. Changes ranged from the trivial to the major, from bool to namespace, from the proper incorporation of the standard C library to the internationalisation overhaul of I/O. Many projects still bear the scars of this portability interregnum.

• Modern C++: This is where we are now. The language was standardised in 1998, providing a fixed target for vendors and a consolidation in thinking and practice. Exception safety is now a well understood topic and the Standard Template Library (STL) part of the library has introduced the full power of generic programming to the language, raising templates from being merely a way to express containers to an integral part of design expression in C++.