Paul Christensen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> So why does my COBOL manual state that a function can convert  to Julian date
> form
> (YYYYDDD) and shows that today would be 2001031 (newer manual, now uses the 4
> digit year,
> whereas I in my olden days ways, still think of a Julian date as YYDDDD).

> Has my COBOL manual been lying to me all these years??

The ANSI COBOL standard started using the term "Julian date form"
when the date conversion functions were added to the language around
1989.  Prior to that (in the 1985 standard), DAY was used as a
conceptual data item with the format YYDDD, but it wasn't actually
called a Julian date in the standard.

In the next COBOL standard (the Final Committee Draft of which has
just been published, by the way), we deliberated whether to change
the terminology because of the confusion with the term Julian Day and
related terms.  One public comment had suggested that we adopt the
term "ordinal date."  We decided not to change from the terminology
we had used in the previous COBOL standard, but we clarified that
we use the term "Julian date form" in the standard to mean YYYYDDD.

Walter Murray
Hewlett-Packard
Representative to the J4 COBOL committee