计算机专业外文翻译--c++的起源一个小的历史_精品.doc

外文原文 The Origins of C++: A Little History Computer technology has evolved at an amazing rate over the past few decades. Today a notebook computer can compute faster and store more information than the mainframe computers of the 1960s. Computer languages have evolved, too. The changes may not be as dramatic, but they are important. Bigger, more powerful computers spawn bigger, more complex programs, which, in turn, raise new problems in program management and maintenance. In the 1970s, languages such as C and Pascal helped usher in an era of structured programming, a philosophy that brought some order and discipline to a field badly in need of these qualities. Besides providing the tools for structured programming, C also produced compact,fast-running programs, along with the ability to address hardware matters, such as managing communication ports and disk drives. These gifts helped make C the dominant programming language in the 1980s. Meanwhile, the 1980s witnessed the growth of a new programming paradigm: object-oriented programming, or OOP, as embodied in languages such as SmallTalk and C++. Let’s examine these C and OOP a bit more closely. The Mechanics of Creating a Program Suppose you’ve written a C++ program. How do you get it running? The exact steps depend on your computer environment and the particular C++ compiler you use, but they should resemble the following steps: 1. Use a text editor of some sort to write the program and save it in a file. This file constitutes the source code for your program. 2. Compile the source code. This means running a program that translates the source code to the internal language, called machine language, used by the host computer. The file containing the translated program is the object code for your program. 3. Link the object code with additional code. For example, C++ programs normally use libraries. A C++ library contains object code for a collection of computer routines, called functions, to perform tasks such as di