Re: Allow to_date() and to_timestamp() to accept localized names

> On Jan 28, 2020, at 9:30 AM, Tom Lane  wrote:
> 
> A brute-force answer, if there are few enough cases, is to recognize
> them regardless of the specific value of LC_TIME.  Do we think
> anybody would notice or care if to_date('Sonnabend', 'TMDay') works
> even when in a non-German locale?

I think this only becomes a problem if there are weekday or month name collisions between languages where they have different meanings.  As an absurd hypothetical, if “Sunday” in Tagalog means what “Tuesday” means in English, then you’ve got a problem.

This does happen for month abbreviations.  “Mar” is short for “March” and variations in a number of languages, but short for “November” in Finnish.

For day abbreviations, “Su” collides between fi_FI and hr_HR, and “tor” collides between sl_SL and no_NO.

I don’t see any collisions with full month or full weekday names, but I’m also only looking at the 53 locales installed in /usr/share/locale/.*/LC_TIME on my mac.

—
Mark Dilger
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