this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the "Convention du Mètre."

These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.

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[–] taiyang 9 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Ah, yes, quite a few systems use that. Iirc, when I first got into research I believe it was SPSS that have me pause (maybe STATA) when dates seemed to reference day in the 60s. It's been a while so I don't remember the specifics, but I always thought it was a neat way to handle dates.

[–] 4z01235 11 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Ah, yes, quite a few systems use that. Iirc, when I first got into research I believe it was SPSS that have me pause (maybe STATA) when dates seemed to reference day in the 60s. It's been a while so I don't remember the specifics, but I always thought it was a neat way to handle dates.

Maybe it was 1 January 1970, the Unix epoch

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Also fun to note is that Excel incorrectly assumes 1900 is a leap year due to errors from Lotus 1-2-3. Once you start working with dates you realize how weird everything gets.

[–] taiyang 4 points 3 days ago

Well, looked it up and it wasn't SPSS I was thinking of, seems they use 1582 and count to by seconds which results in pretty absurd intergers. And STATA arbitrarily uses 1 Jan 1960 because why not.

Honestly your version sounds cooler. I use R now for my data needs, and looking is up, those badasses do use 1 Jan 1970. Why anyone pays for statistical software when we have R and Python, I'll never understand.