Why was it named C++?

Initially the C++ language was named "C with Classes" because you could still write C-like programs in C++ but you could also use what we call classes. I will be sure to talk about classes and other object-oriented C++ concepts in the following tutorials. You might ask, why a successor to C is called C++ and what is this double plus sign business all about? If you were writing a program in C and you wanted to add two numbers together such as 1 + 1, in the listing (or source code) of your program, you would write it just that way as: 1 + 1. Notice that in computer programming, the plus sign is called an operator, it directs the compiler to add two values together. Plenty of times programmers need to add the digit 1 to another digit stored in what is called a variable. Because of the frequent use of these simple arithmetics in general computer programs, a new operator called postfix increment (represented by a double plus sequence: ++) may be used to simply add 1 to the existing value, thus avoiding the redundancy of typing: 1 + 1. It just makes the program code look cleaner and easier to read. Therefore, you can see that the expression C++ actually has a meaning. It is C incremented by 1, or in other words, a version of C programming language that contains additional features. You may also think of C++ as an augmented version of C.

On the other hand, the reason the C programming language is called C, is that it is a successor to the language called B. Simple isn't it? Strange as it is, there was never a programming language called A. Or as far as we know, if there was a language called A, it never saw the light of success or popularity. If you are interested in learning about how C++ falls into the history of computer programming languages, you may want to look at the chart of evolution of computer languages. This hierarchy shows where each computer language came from. As you can see the Assembly Language (which is a low-level programming language) on this chart is located in the upper left corner because it is one of the first languages ever designed and can be considered the grand-father of all computer programming languages. Additionally you may be able to gain an insight from the list of programming languages by date that lists languages in chronological order.