[Rd] as.Date() , feature or bug?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 14 Sep 2005, Uwe Ligges wrote:

> Bo Peng wrote:
>
>>> Well, bug, if you really want to call it a bug that you cannot represent
>>> the year 6666. ;-)
>>
>>
>> So I guess we need a warning message and a line in help(as.Date)?
>
> Even better a fix (than an *error* message), since the POSIX classes can
> handle the date and I do not (yet) see the reason why Date cannot. But I
> have no time to dig deeper (at least not this week).

Well, actually they cannot.  There is a limit of dates +/- 5000 years from 
the epoch (1970-01-01).  This should have returned NA, and now does.

What does anyone want such dates for?  I hope there was an extremely good 
reason to spend other people's time on this, and look forward to an 
extremely convincing explanation.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595