The C programming language has grown popular due to its simplicity, efficiency, and flexibility. C programs are often easily adapted to new environments. The recent ANSI C standard extends, standardizes, and makes consistent traditional C.
Symantec Corporation's* Think C 4.0 (henceforth called TC) is an extension of ANSI C to support object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques. TC programs are organ- ized according to the data structures of interest in the chosen application. Each data structure is encapsulated with the procedures acting upon the data to form an "object". The features of inheritance (objects are easily "derived from" existing objects) and polymorphism (the procedures belonging to related objects may have the same names) are supported in TC. This organization promotes code reusability and maintainability, and allows great model consistency from the analysis through the implementation phases of the overall software engineering effort.
In contrast, conventional C programs are usually organized according to a procedural decomposition. A measure of object-orientation can be achieved in well-structured C programs by defining each data structure and the procedures which act upon it in an individual source file, using "static external" storage. However, the useful inheri-
