Here's another flashback. I used to follow comp.lang.c++ on Usenet & one of the ongoing annoyances was students who wanted the group to do their homework. One day I was feeling especially irritated so I deliberately wrote a C++ program that solved the problem but still should have got the student a fail. Explanation for why if should be a fail is at the bottom of this post.
I sometimes get people from England asking about NZ so I've assembled a short set of facts & figures.
In 1992 I used to work at a place that was transitioning from Cobol on IBM's VSE operating system to Oracle (Forms, Reports, etc) on HP/UX. I was writing Rexx and C and learning C++.
Usenet's alt.folklore.computers was on my reading list and one thread there was a discussion "If the object orientated successor to C is C++, what is the object orientated successor to Cobol?"
When I zapped off a spoof to alt.folklore.computers in January 1992 I never dreamed it would get reprinted in sigplan notices or that there would be citations to the sigplan notices reprint of it floating around 13 years later.
