If you’re reading this article, you probably know they’re both programming languages, but what is the difference between C and C++?

C came first, developed as a procedural block programming language back in 1972. Many of the programming trends we use today, like functions, loops, if/else blocks were used in C. But at the end of the day, C was a procedural language. A program started at the top, and then ran through the program line by line, using functions as necessary to redo common operations.

C++, created in 1979, was originally designed as an extension to C, and introduced the concept of object oriented programming techniques. With object oriented programming, you have classes, which can create objects used by the program. Object oriented programming can allow you to manage more complicated and sophisticated applications; although, some very complicated programs are still developed in C.

C is considered a low level program, allowing the programmer to access hardware directly in many cases, while C++ also does this, but also allows more high-level development, where access to the hardware is abstracted. But C++ is still more low level than newer programming languages, like Java.

C is procedural, while C++ is object oriented. Although the underlying lines of code can be similar, programs are designed completely differently in the two languages.

C++ can compile and run most C code; although, there are a few exceptions, while C can’t compile C++ code at all.

Those are the general differences, but if you’d like some specific differences, to see how functions are programmed, take a look at this site, or this one.