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

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>

From: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
To: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, "scott.marlowe" <scott.marlowe@ihs.com>, Jean-Luc Lachance <jllachan@nsd.ca>, Frank Miles <fpm@u.washington.edu>, Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to>, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net>, pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Date: 2003-06-23T19:22:20Z
Lists: pgsql-general
Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Tom Lane writes:
> 
> > Other than me, I think you mean.  dd/mm/yyyy and mm/dd/yyyy are
> > inherently ambiguous in the real world, and when you can clearly
> > determine what the intended meaning is, I think it's more reasonable
> > to assume the datestyle isn't set correctly than to reject the data.
> 
> That might even make the slightest sense if the supposedly wrong datestyle
> would then stay switched.  But the automatic switching only happens for a
> certain subsets of inputs and only in that instance.  So if a user did
> really mean the opposite setting he will not be happy, and if the user did
> not mean the opposite setting he will not be happy either.  So no one is
> happy.

I think we have had enough discussion to remove the question mark from
this TODO item:

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

Of course, if later discussion changes, I will re-add it.

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