List of blog posts tagged as "trivia".
C++ was made originally to be a preprocessor for the C language. It was coined CPP, PP standing for preprocessor, and used that as one of the acceptable source file name extensions. Later, when CPP was beginning to look like its own language, it was re-coined C++, changing the P's to plus signs to signify it was no longer just a C preprocessor.
What is a preprocessor? In the case of CPP, it was an extension of the C language's features that allowed for more features, like header files and conditionally compiled code. It did this by processing the syntax of CPP into C code before compiling with a C compiler. Interestingly enough, the Haxe language works in a similar way.