From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM
	autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4
X-Google-Thread: 103376,c9d5fc258548b22a
X-Google-NewGroupId: yes
X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
Path: 
 g2news1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.glorb.com!news2.glorb.com!news-xxxfer.readnews.com!news-out.readnews.com!postnews3.readnews.com!postbox2.readnews.com!not-for-mail
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2011 13:59:30 -0500
From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;
 rv:1.9.2.14) Gecko/20110221 Thunderbird/3.1.8
MIME-Version: 1.0
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How do I write directly to a memory address?
References: 
 <67063a5b-f588-45ea-bf22-ca4ba0196ee6@l11g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>
 <31c357bd-c8dc-4583-a454-86d9c579e5f4@m13g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>
 <05a3673e-fb97-449c-94ed-1139eb085c32@x1g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>
 <4d4c232a$0$28967$882e7ee2@usenet-news.net> <4D4D6506.50909@obry.net>
 <4d50095f$0$22393$882e7ee2@usenet-news.net>
 <wcck4hb95jz.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com>
 <4d6d56c4$0$11509$882e7ee2@usenet-news.net>
 <16u9ka51wbukr$.1fj2sb73j9rv6.dlg@40tude.net>
 <4d6d627b$0$11509$882e7ee2@usenet-news.net>
 <29c4lixc0ght$.14kkfz1kij135.dlg@40tude.net>
 <4d6d6afb$0$11509$882e7ee2@usenet-news.net>
 <1gz9984wwizn5.r619fw4z9o56.dlg@40tude.net>
 <4d6e5614$0$21954$882e7ee2@usenet-news.net>
 <l3kbmkshfm1a.151f84up7z7go$.dlg@40tude.net>
 <4d6e64f5$0$21954$882e7ee2@usenet-news.net>
 <4d6e6f79$0$7657$9b4e6d93@newsspool1.arcor-online.net>
 <4d6e7313$0$21956$882e7ee2@usenet-news.net>
 <4d6e902b$0$6760$9b4e6d93@newsspool3.arcor-online.net>
In-Reply-To: <4d6e902b$0$6760$9b4e6d93@newsspool3.arcor-online.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-ID: <4d6e9393$0$17952$a8266bb1@postbox2.readnews.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.186.190.52
X-Trace: 1299092371 postbox2.readnews.com 17952 198.186.190.52:59627
Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:17739
Date: 2011-03-02T13:59:30-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On 3/2/2011 1:44 PM, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> I was told that today's programmers have grown accustomed
> to handling calendar dates as strings.

It's not intrinsically horrible to do things this way
provided you have proper control over your inputs so
that you know you are starting with valid data. But it
obviously makes it easier to lose that control, because
people will be tempted to start fiddling with the data
outside of what the library offers.

I can't say that I've ever written code that way, nor
seen others do so. I've always used data types to hold
dates and times. The only problem is that I've had to
deal with many such types and conversions between them.

> The difficulty is the silent bugs introduced when some subsystem of
> a program produces "legacy calendar date" strings.  They tend to be
> of some non-standard form, one that is not compatible with MySQL's
> expectations, but that MySQL does not reject. You might then
> notice the effects when it is too late.

Yes. If you can't trust your library do to date conversion
properly, then you must add your own validation module and
sanitize all inputs before passing them along. And then it
becomes easy to miss a case and let an error slip through.