4 General principles [intro]

Clause [lex] through Clause [cpp] describe the C++ programming language.

That description includes detailed syntactic specifications in a form described in [syntax].

For convenience, Annex [gram] repeats all such syntactic specifications.

Clause [support] through Clause [exec] and Annex [depr] (the library clauses) describe the C++ standard library.

That description includes detailed descriptions of the entities and macros that constitute the library, in a form described in Clause [library].

Annex [implimits] recommends lower bounds on the capacity of conforming implementations.

Annex [diff] summarizes the evolution of C++ since its first published description, and explains in detail the differences between C++ and C.

Certain features of C++ exist solely for compatibility purposes; Annex [depr] describes those features.