This document specifies requirements for implementations of the C++ programming language. The first such requirement is that they implement the language, so this document also defines C++. Other requirements and relaxations of the first requirement appear at various places within this document.
C++ is a general purpose programming language based on the C programming language as described in ISO/IEC 9899:2018 Programming languages - C (hereinafter referred to as the C standard). C++ provides many facilities beyond those provided by C, including additional data types, classes, templates, exceptions, namespaces, operator overloading, function name overloading, references, free store management operators, and additional library facilities.