Bug #897625 (http://python.org/sf/897625) deals with giving time.strftime() date information that is outside of proper bounds (e.g., using a negative number for the day of the week). This can lead to a crash since it seems some strftime implementations just index into an array for values for text and thus a negative value can lead to bad things happening. I would like to raise a ValueError if the argument is out of range. Problem is that this will break code. I could just force all negative values to all values outside the proper bounds to a reasonable value, but that seems to go against the path of least surprise. That is question 1. Question 2 is what to really check. This really is only a concern for month and day of the week since everything else is just a number and doesn't have some name representation. I could check all 9 values, though, or just these two. Question 3 is whether to extend this to time.asctime() . I have talked to Tim about this and his thoughts are to just deal with time.strftime() and leave everything else alone. That's fine with me, but there is the same possibility of having problems with asctime(). But then again, checking value for asctime() would potentially break even more code. So, thoughts? -Brett