Working Draft, Standard for Programming Language C++

This document specifies requirements for implementations of the C++ programming language. The first such requirement is that they implement the language, so this document also defines C++. Other requirements and relaxations of the first requirement appear at various places within this document.

C++ is a general-purpose programming language based on the C programming language as described in ISO/IEC 9899:2018 Programming languages — C (hereinafter referred to as the C standard). C++ provides many facilities beyond those provided by C, including additional data types, classes, templates, exceptions, namespaces, operator overloading, function name overloading, references, free store management operators, and additional library facilities.

This document presents the basic concepts of the C++ language. It explains the difference between an object and a name and how they relate to the value categories for expressions. It introduces the concepts of a declaration and a definition and presents C++’s notion of type, scope, linkage, and storage duration. The mechanisms for starting and terminating a program are discussed.