idea, has been through quite a few changes before being standardized (Overland, 3) by the International Standards Organization (ISO), American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the British Standards Institute (BSI), and the Deutsches Institut fr Normung (DIN, or the German national standards organization) (Stroustrup).Other InfluencesAda and Clu were major inspirations for C++ templates; its exception handling mechanisms were also profoundly influenced by Ada and Clu as well as the programming language, ML.Ada was a project started in 1975 by the US DoD (United Stated Department of Defense) and was used for implementing systems ordered by the DoD. The language was formalized officially near the end of 1980 and is currently used by NATO and the US DoD for implementation projects for implementation projects. The latest implementation, Ada95 (released in 1995) supports object orientation. Ada was named for Ada, Countess of Lovelace, who was the first programmer - she programmed Babbage’s Difference Engine.Barbara Liskov et al at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed Clu in 1974 - 1975. It is an object-oriented language in the Pascal family that is designed to support “data abstraction” (Johnson) - similar to the language Alphard. Clu, short for CLUster, introduced the concept of the index, or iterator in a “for” loop (a loop is a procedure that performs a set of tasks while a test returns true) (Johnson).The standardized language of ML is a functional programming language meaning that “the full power of mathematical functions is present.” ML is an acronym for Meta Language and is significant in that the term “meta language” is used to describe a language in which others are “discussed or analyzed” (“The Standard ML Programming Language”). The language was originally implemented to find and perform proofs and is prominent in the “computer-as...
