Re: A creepy story about dates. How to prevent it?

Reading the subject, "creepy ... dates", that is exactly how I feel
about the described current date behavior --- "creepy".

Because I have only seen one person defend our current behavior, and
many object, I am going to add to TODO:

    * Allow current datestyle to restrict dates;  prevent month/day swapping
          from making invalid dates valid
    * Prevent month/day swapping of ISO dates to make invalid dates valid

I know someone was mentioning how bad it was that MySQL allows NULL in a
NOT NULL date field, and inserts 00-00-0000.  I think we are pretty
close to that with our current behavior.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Tom Lane writes:
>
> > It would make sense to offer a "strict" mode in which the date order
> > has to be what DateStyle suggests.  I'm astonished that no one seems
> > to get the point that there are also good uses for "lax" parsing.
>
> There are different kinds of lax parsing.
>
> Lax parsing is great if you can enter any of
>
> January 8, 1999
> 1999-01-08
> 1/8/1999
> 990108
> January 8 04:05:06 1999 PST
>
> and it will know what you mean, because of all these have their uses and
> are unambiguous (given a known day/month order).
>
> But automatically switching the declared day/month order based on
> heuristics is not that great.  A human is not going to mentally switch his
> preferred day/month order within the same SQL session.
>
> --
> Peter Eisentraut   peter_e@gmx.net
>
>
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