Re: DIGO (Date in Garbage Out?)

I stand corrected.

I was only considering the 1752 date that Sun uses ("man cal"). I didn't know it wasn't universal (although, in retrospect, thinking it would be universal seems incredibly naive of me).

Here's an interesting tid-bit, by the way... The development environment FORTE uses 14-OCT-1582 as it's value for uninitialized date variables. It creates an Oracle date structure with this value and passes it, as an Oracle date, to Oracle stored procedures. The stored procedures don't validate the date, since they presume it had to be validated when created in the first place. So when it's written to the database, it stores the binary representation for that date in the column. But Oracle doesn't handle the date (since it doesn't exist in it't interpretation of the Gregorian calendar). So that's why you get '00000000' when you TO_CHAR that column with the format 'YYYYMMDD'. The obvious error is the storing of uninitialized values, but the result is still interesting.

Clif Deanhardt

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Before you buy. Received on Wed Nov 03 1999 - 08:18:44 CST