Re: to_date() and to_timestamp() with negative years

> tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us wrote:
>
> Bryn Llewellyn <bryn(at)yugabyte(dot)com> writes:
>> Is there any chance that you might be bold and simply make negative "year" values illegal in "to_date()" and "to_timestamp()" — just as they already are in "make_timestamp()", "make_timestamptz()", and the "from text" typecasts to date-time moment values?
>
> Uh, what?
>
> regression=# select make_timestamp(-44,3,15,0,0,0);
> make_timestamp
> ------------------------
> 0044-03-15 00:00:00 BC
> (1 row)
>
> The other stuff you are talking about looks like confusion around which
> characters are minus signs in the data and which ones are field
> separators. Given the very squishy definitions of to_date/to_timestamp,
> I'm not surprised if that works only with carefully chosen field
> layouts --- but it does work for me with all of these cases:
>
> regression=# select to_date('-0044-03-15', 'YYYY-MM-DD');
> to_date
> ---------------
> 0044-03-15 BC
> (1 row)
>
> regression=# select to_date('03-15--0044', 'MM-DD-YYYY');
> to_date
> ---------------
> 0044-03-15 BC
> (1 row)
>
> regression=# select to_date('03/15/-0044', 'MM/DD/YYYY');
> to_date
> ---------------
> 0044-03-15 BC
> (1 row)
>
> I'd be the first to agree that that code is a mess and could stand to
> be rewritten --- but I seriously doubt that we'd take a patch that
> intentionally breaks cases that work fine today. There's also the
> angle that these are supposed to be Oracle-compatible, so I wonder
> what Oracle does with such input.

I just ran your test:

select make_timestamp(-44,3,15,0,0,0);

in each of the three environments that I mentioned—but especially, therefore, in PG 13.4 (on macOS).

It cased the error that I mentioned:

ERROR: 22008: date field value out of range: -44-03-15

It's the same with "make_timestamp()".

In what PG version did you run your test?

I'm not surprised that grandfathered-in "solution" that I described will never go away—despite its questionable conceptual basis.