Thank you SO much, Oracle...

Always makes my day when I run a piece of code that does exactly what the Oracle documentation says to do, and then I get the good ol' "ORA-03001: unimplemented feature" error...um, Oracle dudes, how hard is this? If you haven't implemented it yet, then DON'T PUT IT IN YOUR @#$!@#!@# DOCUMENTATION AS THOUGH IT WORKS.

That is all.

Also there's a distinction between the logical state and the internal state of an object that's only been recognized since, oh, maybe the Stone Age (in software-development-theory time, which admittedly moves faster than geological time but still...). This would mean that an even moderately-well-designed object-oriented language allows you to change the private internal state of a "constant" object as long as you don't change the public logical state of that object...oh, wait, you guys haven't yet heard about distinguishing between a public interface and a private implementation?

Oh. Um. Okay...[drums fingers on desk while trying to think of a way to be encouraging to these particular persons of severely limited competence]...so, are you guys any good at cooking hamburgers and French fries?

[shakes head and sets about finding a workaround for a perfectly good piece of code that doesn't work in his specific Oracle environment]