The New Hacker's Dictionary

1. C plus plus

   Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup of AT&T Bell Labs as a successor to C. Now one of the languages of choice, although many hackers still grumble that it is the successor to either Algol 68 or Ada (depending on generation), and a prime example of second-system effect. Almost anything that can be done in any language can be done in C++, but it requires a language lawyer to know what is and what is not legal — the design is almost too large to hold in even hackers' heads. Much of the cruft results from C++'s attempt to be backward compatible with C. Stroustrup himself has said in his