C & C++

C began to grow in popularity not just for systems programming, but as a general purpose programming language. Today C is one of the most used programming languages. The C programmer must realize, however, that C was designed to replace assembler language, and that in several important ways, it retains a very low level view of the machine.

This language summary will discuss, among other things. some of the low level characteristics of C. The C++ programming language was designed as a higher level version of C, providing support for object-oriented programming. Some features of C++ are discussed in this summary, and some are discussed under classes, later. C++ retains almost all of C, however, and therefore is a mixture of low level and high level features. Often, the programmer has a choice of using low level or high level approaches.