...and right they are

All I can say is that in many previous jobs if I had tried to force everyone to use C++ they would have killed me -- but a few simple ADTs they were quite happy with. That the data structures happen to use structures containing function pointers and up-pointers to ancestor structures internally, just like C++ classes, is something they didn't need to know or care about unless they were adding a new descendant ADT. They had their happy C still. (Also, we had a lot of pre- and post-processors involved which could parse C -- just -- but had no chance of parsing C++. One of them claimed to parse C++, but it couldn't handle templates at all, so it barfed on the G++ headers. Most impressive. Not.)