Programming in C

jtw11:
I believe the Arduino language is a type of C++

No, it is C++.

OTOH the style of programming you do on the Arduino isn't the style of C++ programming you should use on desktop machines. On desktops you should be worrying about "RAII". On the Arduino most things are statically created/allocated - you're controlling a dozen output pins, not reading data into memory for processing.