to_date() and invalid dates

Hi,

I asked this a while back already:

select to_date('2013-02-31', 'yyyy-mm-dd');

will not generate an error (unlike e.g. Oracle)

However in the release notes of 9.2.3[1] it is mentioned that

- Reject out-of-range dates in to_date() (Hitoshi Harada)

I tried the above statement using 9.2.6 and 9.3.2 in both versions 2013-02-03 is returned instead of rejecting the input.
The same is true if e.g. an invalid month is specified: to_date('2013-17-09', 'yyyy-mm-dd').

Does this check need a configuration setting to be in effect?

Regards
Thomas

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/release-9-2-3.html