It is normal that if you override an contructor in a derived class you must call the base constructor explicitly. The fact that sqplus crashes otherwise, is probably because they don't want to put a check for each method call to see if an object has been properly constructed. Bottom line, is not a bug. Maybe the SQPlus guys could put an assertion somewhere that is only compiled in debug mode or somthing similar, so that this issues are easier to pindown.
Alberto