roger.plowman (11/28/2011)
Using single quotes for both strings and dates is a brain-dead design decision--period.
Technically, T-SQL is not using single quotes for both strings and dates. It uses single quotes for strings only.
There is no way to have date literals in T-SQL; that's why we have to make do with string literals that will be converted (at execution time) to date or datetime values.
</pedantic>