Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mwcremer 1187 days ago
My favorite C++ joke is: Have you heard about the new object-oriented version of COBOL?

It’s called “ADD 1 TO COBOL”

3 comments

That's more like ++C. You need "ADD 1 TO COBOL RETURNING COBOL"... which elicits another C++ joke: that it would have been nice to get to use the better version, but someone used the wrong operator, so what we have is certainly complicated but probably just more of the same.
The ++ is probably overloaded, and actually formats your hard disk, instead of incrementing a number.

(Just like >> is overloaded to do IO, instead of shifting bits.)

My favorite, best told while among C programmers involuntarily debugging some gnarly C++ is, "Man, I swear, the dude that invented C++ doesn't know the difference between increment and excrement."
C++ makes C bigger, returning the same value.