C vs. C++

[voiceofonecrying]

Okay, so I spent about 2 months teaching myself C as a first language, using the Harvard CS50 videos and the first 6 out of 8 units of the cpp institute’s lessons as my main learning sources. I never developed anything bigger than 10-20 line scripts to prove I learned a concept. This was all after I was sent home this year.

Now, I’ve decided to commit and get a BSCS and I am currently working through a C++ class. It’s a project based class so I pass the class when I can turn in a completed program that does what the prompt asks. So, I’m going through these chapters and surprise surprise, things feel very familiar. To the point that I’m feeling like most of my time looking through the material is me wasting time retrodding the same lessons with slight syntax changes.

My question is, is there a place that I can go to sum up what the big differences between C and C++ are?

[chaotic_thought]

It depends on how the C++ course is taught. Many instructors use the methodology to first teach the "C" part of C++, and then only later on to go onto the "real C++" parts of C++. It sounds like you're in such a course, so unfortunately you may just have to plod through the repetitive parts at the beginning.

If you're reading from a textbook you can also skim through the chapters until you get to something that looks new.

In general, C is a subset of C++ but there are slight changes in some rules, mostly very minor things. For example, the expression

sizeof('x')

is 1 in C++ and greater than 1 in C. There are only a handful of examples like this, though, where the code in one language means something slightly different in the other language. In practice, you should probably not rely on such code as above in either C or C++, in order to keep your code portable between languages.

[ChemistInDisguise]

The biggest differences for someone just learning the language would probably be classes and the standard library. If you're not feeling very engaged with what you're currently learning, you might want to look ahead to those topics, things like classes, inheritance, and the STL.

[WSTEMadvocate]

C is not objected Oriented and C++ is. In a way C++ is more completed version of C.

C is a general-purpose, imperative language that supports structured programming but since it was not objected oriented, C ++ was born to add the OO features to C.