Re: oh dear ...

On Fri, 14 Nov 2003, Tom Lane wrote:

> I said:
> > This worked in 7.3:
> > regression=# select '1999-jan-08'::date;
> > ERROR: date/time field value out of range: "1999-jan-08"
> > HINT: Perhaps you need a different "datestyle" setting.
>
> > Setting DateStyle to YMD doesn't help, and in any case I'd think that
> > this ought to be considered an unambiguous input format.
>
> This appears to be an oversight in the portions of the datetime code
> that we recently changed to enforce DateStyle more tightly.
> Specifically, DecodeNumber was rewritten without realizing that it was
> invoked in a special way when a textual month name appears in the input.
> DecodeDate actually makes two passes over the input, noting the textual
> month name in the first pass, and then calling DecodeNumber on only the
> numeric fields in the second pass. This means that when DecodeNumber is
> called for the first time, the MONTH flag may already be set. The
> rewrite mistakenly assumed that in this case we must be at the second
> field of an MM-DD-YY-order input.
>
> I propose the attached patch to fix the problem. It doesn't break any
> regression tests, and it appears to fix the cases noted in its comment.
>
> Opinions on whether to apply this to 7.4?

based on "ought to be considered an unambiguous input format", I'd say
leave it for 7.4.1 ...