Well... I disagree with your disagreement. There's a whole lot of context missing in that question which just nixed it for me. I really got the impression that the poster either didn't get it and thinks it's a perl question or was just leaving some perl crumbs onto a SQL only problem.

It's entirely possible for a person who knows ANSI SQL would notice that DATE is reserved but in general the entire behaviour in question is going to very RDBMS specific. There just isn't any fair way for the people here to guess at what the RDBMS was really doing since no one knew what it is. It's sort of like asking about some specific output from ps(1). While we all know what that is and in general it acts (I suppose) similarly from UNIX to UNIX the actual options are going to be different and it isn't really fair to expect any PM to be able to answer the question.

I'm also ill and cranky today so that's partly why I'm less tolerant than I might be normally. I thought I was fair - mostly.