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A-Shell Reference

CCYY:##

(default ## = 60) This code affects the way INFLD and IDTIM guess at the century in a six digit date format. The two digit number (##) sets the minimum year which will be assumed to be part of the twentieth century. Any year below that will be assumed to be part of the twenty-first century. For example, if you specify SBR=CCYY:25 and then supply a date to INFLD or IDTIM like 09/15/22, it will be treated as 15-Sep-2022. However, if the date you enter is 09/15/25, then it will be treated as 15-Sep-1925. This can be useful as part of a simplified workaround to the Y2K millennium problem in applications where the range of dates being dealt with is significantly less than 100 years. For example, a typical accounting system is only concerned with dates within a range of a few years. However, note that by itself, it doesn’t do anything for you unless you are storing your dates in some kind of format which can support century information. For example, if you are taking the result of IDTIM and storing it in a 4 byte binary format, or if you are using the INFLD type "j" to return the date in Julian format, then this CCYY trick can be helpful. But if you are merely calling INFLD to get a date in MMDDYY format and are then storing it in your files as MMDDYY, the CCYY trick doesn’t do anything for you except correctly determine whether 02/29/00 is valid or not; 02/29/2000 is but 02/29/1900 is not.