C++ is an object-oriented language. So to use C++:

C++ was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup ^[4] at Bell Labs (now AT&T Labs) during 1983-1985. It is based on the C language (named in 1972) that was developed at AT&T for Unix systems in the early 70's (1969-1973) by Dennis Ritchie. Believe it or not, the C language was a descendent of the B language developed in 1970 by Ken Thompson, which in turn was a descendent of the BCPL language developed by Martin Richards, a Cambridge Student visiting MIT.

As well as adding object-oriented technologies (originally he called it C with Classes), C++ also improves the C language by adding features such as better type checking. The language very quickly came into widespread use and is today one of the best known object-oriented languages. The fast uptake was mainly due to its similarity to the C programming syntax, being an extension to the C language that allowed existing C code to be used when possible. C++ is not a purely object-oriented language, rather it is a hybrid - having both the organisational structure of object-oriented languages, but retaining the efficiencies of C, such as types, pointers etc.

In 1998 the ANSI/ISO (American Standard Institute/International Organization for Standardisation) committee adopted a worldwide uniform language specification that was to remove inconsistencies between the various C++ compilers ^[5]. Unfortunately not all compilers support this standard, even today. This is a problem with C++, as each vendor can have their own flavour of C++, where code developed on one compiler on one operating system may not necessarily compile on another compiler on another operating system.