I'm too tired to think about this more tonight, but it seems like the basic point is that we can't just construct a list of pointers into (a copy of) the original input string.
I think we _can_ do it that way, it's just a question of whether that is the best approach. I think the solution I outlined before would work fine: pass the length of the working buffer to ParseDateTime(), and reject the input only if the parsing process actually requires more working space than was provided. ParseDateTime() can easily skip whitespace without storing it in the temporary buffer -- and once we've done that, AFAIK we _can_ place an upper bound on the amount of working space that is needed (each field has a maximum length and there are a maximum number of fields).
Or we could rewrite how we do parsing, which seems to be what you're suggesting. I agree the code could do with cleanup, although we will also need some kind of minimally-invasive fix for back branches.
-Neil
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