The reason is that you can't really turn date parsing off - if you have
datetime db columns you will get datetime pandas cols. so false setting
is misleading. Parse dates is for when you want to force
specific apparently non-datetime cols to be treated as datetimes, e.g
integer timestamps.

On Thursday, January 23, 2014, Joris Van den Bossche <
notifications@github.com> wrote:

> In pandas/io/sql.py:
>
> >
> >
> > -def read_frame(sql, con, index_col=None, coerce_float=True, params=None):
> > +def read_sql(sql, con, index_col=None, flavor='sqlite', coerce_float=True, params=[], parse_dates=[]):
>
> Maybe better [] -> False as default value for parse_dates? (for
> consistency with other read functions) Or is there a reason to use an empty
> list? And maybe None for params.
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub<https://github.com/pydata/pandas/pull/5950/files#r9132914>
> .
>