Are you storing date in the character field?

>We have an application in production and one of the new engineers some how managed to enter the following information within double quotes into a date field "n/a". This was brought to my attention so I had to take a look at it.
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>There is code at the object level to prevent this as well as in the Save method. As I have been writing applications for 19 years I found this to be interesting. Many of us tested the application after this incident and could not enter anything other than a properly formatted date. Must have been beginners luck!
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>Programming can be such fun!
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>Tom