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Admin
Readers who remember ddate will know that Bureaucracy is actually the 4th month of the year, the others being Chaos, Discord, Confusion and The Aftermath. Each of which is 73 days long, which is how the Discordian calendar fill out a whole year with only 5 months. The 5th Bureaucracy happens to be Zaraday, celebrating Zarathud because all apostle holydays are on the fifth. No, I'm not making any of this up.
Edit Admin
Hail Eris for giving us such a sensible and reasonable way to measure time!
Edit Admin
I wonder if the pattern was there first, and then they added the date type so that their application would automatically create a date object instead of just a string.
Admin
if you want to ruin the validation, surely you have to do more than just add a needless check that sort of the right digits appear in the right places, without requiring something that eliminates all (or some) valid dates. As a way to ruin validation of dates i'd call this a failure, because all it does is slow it down a little. (but maybe that might be enough, if what is needed is to validate "today's" date, very close to midnight....)
Admin
Actually, the pattern restricts valid years to the range 1000-2999. Whether this is intended/harmless/useful or not is highly debatable, but it does slightly change the behaviour. IF this was the intended effect, it would have been much clearer with something like "(1|2).*" though (perhaps with an additional ^ anchor, depending on the exact XSD pattern validation rules, which I'm not familiar with).
Edit Admin
It's obvious to me that Dragnslcr is correct: someone wrote the horrible pattern, tested it against his own data and declared that it worked . . . until someone else came along, realized it was bullshit, and added the "xsd:date" type to make it work. They left the ugliness to taunt the original programmer.
Edit Admin
I do wonder if it was meant to restrict the valid years to the range 1900-2099. (It's worth noting that outside of a few allegations of Social-Security or pension fraud, all humans now alive were born after 1 Jan 1900.) (Which would make the "proper" regex
(19|20).*.)Edit Admin
I still haven't decided whether Discordianism is more of a joke than a religion, or more of a religion than a joke. I'm pretty sure it's on the joke side, but it's been going on so long that it may not be far on the joke side.
Edit Admin
You forgot the last 1/3 of things that they do not have understand (yes, this adds up to more than 100%): regex (not for the syntax but for what they should be used)