Confusion caused by reference to year in question (2082)

The 7 March quiz asked:

"Which of the choices define a function that accepts any date in 2011 and returns the date of the first day of the next quarter from that date? Note: quarters begin on the following dates: 1 January, 1 April, 1 July, and 1 October."

Two players raised a concern about my reference to "any date in 2011," as follows:

"I had a problem with todays quiz. I answered it the way I feel you intended it to be, on the merits of functionality. But by adding a specific year into the question, some might feel that you need to set up a check to see if it is that year that is coming in through the parameter. therefore, no answers would be correct."

"I found the "accepts any date in 2011" misleading - to me this suggests an exclusion of non-2011 dates which is not in any of the choices. The only implicit restriction that I could see was that the passed date needed to be less than 01-Oct-9999."

My response: I see what you mean and if the question constituted technical specifications for a program to be written for an application, then I would also agree. There is no validation in any of the solutions for this restriction on dates. This is, however, a quiz - and your job was to determine if an implementation would in fact accept any date in 2011 and...so on. It doesn't say anything about rejecting a date not in the year. So I don't see any reason to change the scoring on this turn.

You might be interested to know why I would add this "clause" to the question - it has lots to do with my effort to create interesting quizzes, but also with some odd aspects of Oracle's handling of dates.

First, I like to offer more than one correct solution for most of my quizzes. That keeps players "on their toes" and also often serves as a way to demonstrate that there is always multiple solutions to a given problem in programming, and all solutions are not equal.

Many times, we end up writing long, elaborate algorithms, all the time thinking to ourselves: "It shouldn't be this hard, it can't take all this code...surely there is a better way?" But we don't listen to that voice. I encourage you to listen, and be ready to back away from code you have written, and challenge your assumptions.

So I decided to include this choice as an option:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION plch_day1_nextq (date_in IN DATE)
   RETURN DATE
IS
   c_year    CONSTANT INTEGER := TO_CHAR (date_in, 'yyyy');
   c_date   CONSTANT DATE := TRUNC (date_in);

   FUNCTION date_in_year (part_in IN VARCHAR2)
      RETURN DATE
   IS
   BEGIN
      RETURN TO_DATE (c_year || '-' || part_in, 'YYYY-MM-DD');
   END date_in_year;
BEGIN
   RETURN CASE
             WHEN c_date < date_in_year ('04-01')
             THEN
                date_in_year ('04-01')
             WHEN c_date < date_in_year ('07-01')
             THEN
                date_in_year ('07-01')
             WHEN c_date < date_in_year ('10-01')
             THEN
                date_in_year ('10-01')
             ELSE
                TO_DATE (TO_CHAR (c_year + 1) || '-01-01', 'YYYY-MM-DD')
          END;
END;
/

It is a great example of "over-engineering" a solution, doing it with brute force, rather than simply finding the best built-in(s) to do the job.

But I wanted it to be a valid solution and that immediately leads to questions like "Will it handle any date? What about valid date ranges for Oracle? Do those vary by version?"

It turns out, in fact, that if I want that monstrous function to be a valid choice, there is more to address than simply saying "Any date between" Oracle's supported date range. One of my reviewers noted that this function also will fail if a date with a year number of 0 is passed into it, raising this error:

ORA-01841: (full) year must be between -4713 and +9999, and not be 0

Now, I suppose I could have continued my work on this function until it handled all scenarios, but quite honestly I am a bit busy these days and...who knows what other odd behavior a player would uncover...

So I "slapped on" the reference to dates in 2011. It is, in other words, an artificial constraint whose purpose is to simplify the choices and my life.