I keep hearing from people (including veteran programmers) there will be some computers problems handling the date this Thursday for September 9, 1999, similar to the y2k problem but on a much smaller scale. They say the date 9999 will be confused with the max value 9999 used by some data processing programs written in languages like SAS and Cobol.
However, I don’t see why there would be a problem because a program would need 6 digits to represent a complete date. Sept 9, 1999, would be 090999, so there would be no conflict with a max value 999999. If a program only used four digits for dates, the program wouldn’t work for dates where the month or day was > 9, such as Sept 10, Oct 5, Nov 14, etc…
Am I missing something, or am I right that there should be no 9999 problem with computer programs?