Re: Admiral Tuttle (Should be ...) Revisited

[pipex!bnr.co.uk!uknet!mcsun!sunic!news.lth.se!dag@uunet.uu.net (Dag Bruc]

In <comp.lang.ada> cjames@DSC.BLM.GOV (Colin James 0621) writes:
>
>Mark C Carroll, and others, assert that C++ is not a pre-processor
>and that C does not necessarily produce faster running code.  In
>my opinion they are misinformed because the original definition
>and intent of C++ was as a pre-processor to generate C code (not
>assembler or machine code).  If C++ has become something else then
>it should have a new name such as C+++ for non-pre-processor
>implementations on hardware platforms such as PC's.

C++ is a programming language, currently being standardized by ISO.

The definition of C++ does not and has never relied on any particular
form of implementation, although care has been take to _also_ allow
generation of C code as intermediate language.

Even the first C++ implementation was a real compiler in the sense
that it built a complete internal representation before generating
output code.  A pre-processor is in my view a transformer that passes
at least some of the input through without analyzing it.

Your comments about the name of the language are irrelevant.

For more information about the development of C++, I recommend a paper
from the second History Of Programming Languages conference; the
proceedings can be found in a recent issue of SIGPLAN Notices.

Dag Bruck
--
Head of Swedish Delegation, ISO C++ standardization committee
Member of ANSI C++ standardization committee