1.1. Design Decisions

Why did you choose to extend an existing language instead of creating a new one?

Bjarne Stroustrup: When I started—in 1979—my purpose was to help programmers build systems. It still is. To provide genuine help in solving a problem, rather than being just an academic exercise, a language must be complete for the application domain. That is, a non-research language exists to solve a problem. The problems I was addressing related to operating system design, networking, and simulation. I—and my colleagues—needed a language that could express program organization as could be done in Simula (that's what people tend to call object-oriented programming), but also write efficient low-level code, as could be done in C. No language that could do both existed in 1979, or I would have used it. I didn't particularly want to design a new programming language; I just wanted to help solve a few problems.