More people know C then C++ ?

[activecat]

I came across this at GNU website:

http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html
Section 3.1, second paragraph:

C has one other advantage over C++ and other compiled languages: more people know C, 
so more people will find it easy to read and modify the program if it is written in C. 

I doubt this statement is true.
There are more colleges/universities teaching C++ rather then C as the first programming language. Then it should be more people knowing C++ rather than C.

[kbw]

I doubt this statement is true.
There are more colleges/universities teaching C++ rather then C as the first programming language. Then it should be more people knowing C++ rather than C.

There's knowing C++ and there's knowing C++. It's an incredibly compex language and continues to evolve for some reason making it less portable than it could be. So it's mainly used in silo'd environments.

C is portable and ubiqutous and sufficient for small/medium sized projects such as the typical open source stuff; thus more common.

[activecat]

One interesting thing worth mentioning here; in contrast, GCC has recently migrated to C++ as its implementation language.

http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/cxx-conversion