Problem in converting int to timestamp value - why?

Hello,

I've an integer column in a certain table that I need to convert into a
timestamp value to finally get a day difference to the current date.
>From the manual it looks like straight forward, but the following line
is a great mistery for me:

SELECT to_timestamp(to_char(20041217, '9999 99 99'), 'YYYY MM DD')

results in a timestamp "2171-11-05 22:00:00" ??? The int-to-char
conversion works well ("2004 12 17") but the to_timestamp() doesn't work
as expected - why?

I'm running Postgresql 7.4

Thanks a lot,
Soeren Gerlach

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