Will gcc lower C++ to C ?

[Daniel S. Wilkerson]

Hello.  I'm part of a research project where we have tools for doing
static analysis of C code that we would like to run on some C++.  I
would like to know I can do the following with gcc when compiling C++.

    1 - "Lower" the C++ files to C files.
    2 - Change the C.
    3 - Resume compiling and linking down to an executable.

It seems that this was not possible with older versions of gcc, but I'm
hoping it has changed.

Thank you,
Daniel