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