You're not responding to the part where parent says the result is not 1/2 as in 0.5 but 2-Jan. The boobytrapped date parsing appears to be still happening even with "Automatic Data Conversions" disabled.
I understood that 1/2 converts to 2-Jan (or 1-Feb depending on settings).
That is desired behaviour. If you want the string 1/2 you need to use an apostrophe. If you want the fraction one half you need to use an equals sign. Both of these are vastly less likely to be what a user wants than the date interpretation, so it makes sense for that to be the default.
