If there’s interest I could do a thread explaining this, but the tl;dr is that there’s certainly no general COBOL feature that would make this true, and I can find no evidence of any implementations that do this.
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been wondering about that for a while, thanks for actually doing the legwork! looks like this blog post dug into it a bit too: https://iter.ca/post/1875-epoch/
apparently some versions of this claim say that COBOL actually _uses_ ISO 8601 which seems chronologically extremely unlikely given the age of the COBOL likely powering SSA
Yes actually my first exposure to this claim was a TikTok that said this. It’s silly for a number of reasons. ISO 8601 has no epoch anyway (rather the 2004 version of the standard had some flavor text about the Meter Convention being a reference date for the Gregorian calendar)
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