With the millennium language extensions (MLE), you can make simple changes in your COBOL programs to define date fields. The compiler recognizes and acts on these dates by using a century window to ensure consistency.
Use the following steps to implement automatic date recognition in a COBOL program:
You can use certain programming techniques to take advantage of date processing and control the effects of using date fields such as when comparing dates, sorting and merging by date, and performing arithmetic operations involving dates. The millennium language extensions support year-first, year-only, and year-last date fields for the most common operations on date fields: comparisons, moving and storing, and incrementing and decrementing.
related concepts
Millennium language extensions (MLE)
related tasks
Resolving date-related logic problems
Using year-first, year-only, and year-last date fields
Manipulating literals as dates
Setting triggers and limits
Sorting and merging by date
Performing arithmetic on date fields
Controlling date processing explicitly
Analyzing and avoiding date-related diagnostic messages
Avoiding problems in processing dates
related references
DATEPROC
YEARWINDOW
DATE FORMAT clause (Enterprise COBOL Language Reference)