Don McCrady is a REAL SHARP guy from the IBM Toronto Laboratory, where they craft some of IBM's language products. He talked here about the advantages of C++ over plain old C. He turned out to be pretty enthusiastic.

While C++ is most notable for its object orientation, it is true that it can be used as simply a better C. If you have C programmers on your staff, they can almost immediately use some new tricks that C++ provides without having to spend a lot of time training. Some of these tricks are:

Inlining:

It is possible to specify that a call to a C++ subroutine be expanded inline, so that the overhead for the subroutine call can be eliminated.

Function overloading:

You can write subroutines that take parameters of different types. For example, you might pass an integer to the subroutine one time, and a floating point number the next.

References:

Classic C only allows call-by-value, where a subroutine cannot change the value of an argument. C++ allows call-by-name on a parameter by parameter basis.

The effort to make effective use of C++'s object facilities can be long and arduous. It took a couple of months for some of the Toronto Labs' people to feel competent, and I get the feeling that these people are pretty good. McCrady has gotten mileage out of the C++ notion of encapsulation, where implementation details are hidden from callers of a function.

The Toronto Labs' C++ effort has been successful. All new Toronto Labs work in the future will be done in C++, where possible.