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

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.

regards, tom lane