gcc: error trying to exec ‘cc1plus’: execvp: No such file or directory

While I was installing some software on a client machine I got the following error:

gcc: error trying to exec 'cc1plus': execvp: No such file or directory error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

Even though this doesn’t matter so much (as it can happen in other cases also) the software that I was trying to install was the perl module Encode::Detect.