Beautiful C++: 30 Core Guidelines for Writing Clean, Safe, and Fast Code

Chapter 1.1

P.2: Write in ISO Standard C++

What is ISO Standard C++?

This book is all about writing good code. The first piece of advice is therefore to write in ISO Standard C++. But what exactly is that?

A history of C++

C++ didn’t start out as a standardized language. It started out as an extension to the C programming language, called “C with classes,” invented by Bjarne Stroustrup.¹ C wasn’t a standardized language at that time either: Bjarne delivered his extension as a preprocessor called Cpre. These features included classes and derived classes, with public/private access levels, friends, assignment operator overloading, constructors, and destructors. Also, inline functions and default function arguments were included, along with type-checking ...