Bjarne Stroustrup
Basic info
Bjarne Stroustrup1 born on 30 december 1950, is a danish computer scientist. He is best known for the creation and development of the programming language C++ (Cee plus pus)2. Stroustrup took his master's degree from the Aarhus university in Denmark, and then went on to do a Ph.D in computer science from the Famous University of Cambridge, England3 in 1979.
Development of C++
His most notable work for the computer science field came in 1978, when he started developing C++ (then called C with Classes). It is a general purpose programming language, which contains imperative, object-oriented and generic programmic features. It also provides the facilities for low level memory manipulation. Bjarne's goal was to add object oriented programming into the C language, which is a language well respected for its portability without sacrificing speed or low-level functionality. His version of the language included classes, default function arguments, inlining, basic inheritance and strong type checking in addition to all the features of the C language.
The compiler for the first C with classes was called Cfront1, derived from the C compiler CPre. Cfront was a program designed to translate C with classescode to ordinary C. However, Cfront was abondoned in 1993 due to the fact that it became difficult to integrate new features (C++ exceptions) into it. Nonetheless, Cfront had a huge impact in the Unix operating system and the implementation if future compilers.
In 1983, the name was changed to C++.any new features were also added to the language by this time, the most note-worthy of which are fucntion overloading, virtual functions, references with the & symbol and the single line comments using the two forward slashes (taken from the language BCPL5). In 1985, Bjarne's reference to the language, entitled The C++ Programming Language6 was published. That same year C++ was implemented as a commercial product. The book was a very important reference as the language had not been officially standardized yet. The language was updated again, in 1989, to include inheritance from several classes and protected and static members followed by the updated second edition of "The C++ Programming Language" in 1991. In 1990, The Annotated C++ Reference Manual7 was released which was written by Margaret A. Ellis and Bjarne Stroustrup.
Stroustrup also won several awards, and is still highly respected in his field. He holds the college of Engineering chair in Computer science at the Texas AM University8 and is a visiting professor at the Columbia University.9