I come not to bury C++, but to praise it...

[Graham Dumpleton]

claird at lairds.com (Cameron Laird) wrote in message news:<100aoq8efq3nt1e at corp.supernews.com>...
> In article <40055560.7A0DCD0D at engcorp.com>,
> Peter Hansen  <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
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> >John, thanks for the reminder about the origins of C++.  (I suspect the majority
> >of readers in this group were not even programming during the CFront era 
> >(roughly 1983-85?), and a history lesson is always good from time to time.)
> 			.
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> I was still fussing with cfront in the early '90s.
> Its era *had* passed by then, though.

Ahh yes, the good old days. Well maybe not.

I once played with version E of cfront once. Ie., before even version
1.0, the E
being for experimental. At least that is from memory what is was
called. That
was back in 1984 and even at that time version 1.2 of cfront was
already out
I think. At the end of that year I got a student vacation job at the
first company
in Australia to be using C++. We had access to beta versions of the
compiler
from AT&T/USL and I think during that time a beta version of 2.0
turned up.
Not sure how long after that it actually got released properly. It was
after that
that Sun and Centerline brought out compilers based on cfront. Note
that these
compilers still didn't implement templates, they only turned up some
number
of years later in version 3.0 in the early 90's some time. In the
interim we were using
a hacked up cpp which could understand enough of the C++ template
syntax
to allow us to make decent use of them. From memory, the first C++
compiler
to actually come out with support for templates wasn't even the
AT&T/USL
version 3.0 of cfront, instead it was a hacked up version of cfront
2.1 made to
support templates and was released by ObjectStore, the OODBMS
developer.
Don't think it supported template functions though, only template
classes.
Anyway later cfront 3.0 became more available. Actually, it was
version 3.0.1.
Version 3.0 mustn't have lived very long because we never actually got
to
see it. There was a subsequent cfront 3.0.2 and I think that was the
last of
them from USL. Sun and Centreline also came out with versions based on
cfront 3.0.1 before Centerline dissappeared altogether and Sun changed
to
the cafe based compiler which they developed. There was GNU C++ as
well,
but it was quite late to the game in providing a version with
templates which
actually worked. Lucid C++ was an interesting compiler but it also
died. At
that time the best compilers were probably those based on the EDG
engine. Oh
must not forget the SGI and HP versions of cfront 3.0.1. Ah, but then
maybe
we should forget the HP version. Anyway, there were a number of other
C++
compiler vendors as well, especially in the cross development arena,
but enough
already.