Any one suppose that these functions return the same:
make_date(-1,1,1)
to_date('-1-01-01','yyyy-mm-dd')
But make_date will give 0001-01-01 BC
And to_date will give 0002-01-01 BC
Interesting...and a fair point.
What seems to be happening here is that to_date is trying to be helpful by doing:
select to_date('0000','YYYY'); // 0001-01-01 BC
It does this seemingly by subtracting one from the year, making it positive, then (I infer) appending "BC" to the result. Thus for the year "-1" it yields "0002-01-01 BC"
make_date just chooses to reject the year 0 and treat the negative as an alternative to specifying BC
There seems to be zero tests for to_date involving negative years, and the documentation doesn't talk of them.
I'll let the -hackers speak up as to how they want to go about handling to_date (research how it behaves in the other database it tries to emulate and either document or possibly change the behavior in v14) but do suggest that a simple explicit description of how to_date works in the presence of negative years be back-patched. A bullet in the usage notes section probably suffices:
"If a YYYY format string captures a negative year, or 0000, it will treat it as a BC year after decreasing the value by one. So 0000 maps to 1 BC and -1 maps to 2 BC and so on."
So, no, make_date and to_date do not agree on this point; and they do not have to. There is no way to specify "BC" in make_date function so using negative there makes sense. You can specify BC in the input string for to_date and indeed that is the only supported (documented) way to do so.
David J.