I have never seen so many stupid people pretending to be halfway smart as in this section. It's COBOL, not Cobol, and it does not represent years as strings, you morons. You use two digits - digits, not strings - in WORKING STORAGE, denoting them as '99', meaning directly two digits. In IBM's own collating sequence of course.

Why don't you people just bugger out of here and leave this high brow stuff to people with an education and an IQ above that of your ilk - that of the common ape?