Rational Developer for System z
COBOL for Windows, Version 7.5, Programming Guide


Principles and objectives of these extensions

To gain the most benefit from the millennium language extensions, you need to understand the reasons for their introduction into the COBOL language.

The millennium language extensions focus on a few key principles:

Based on these principles, the millennium language extensions are designed to meet several objectives. You should evaluate the objectives that you need to meet in order to resolve your date-processing problems, and compare them with the objectives of the millennium language extensions, to determine how your application can benefit from them. You should not consider using the extensions in new applications or in enhancements to existing applications, unless the applications are using old data that cannot be expanded until later.

The objectives of the millennium language extensions are as follows:

The extensions do not provide fully specified or complete date-oriented data types, with semantics that recognize, for example, the month and day parts of Gregorian dates. They do, however, provide special semantics for the year part of dates.


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