John Lowry writes:
Just to play devil's advocate ... I can't see how, in my lifetime
and as a practical matter, the lack of a century field in UTCT
is going to be confusing.
Granted its absence represents a lack of good taste :-)
The problems turn up if you want to compare two dates to see which one
occurs later. A date in 2001 will seem to occur before a data 1998.
This is particularly bad if, as many programs do, 99 is considered to
be infinitely in the future. OS/360 used to store the expiration date
of a file with the year in two digits. Infinity was represented as 99.
When the current date went past the expiration date, the file would
be automatically deleted. This has led some people to predict that
many computer systems will have catastrophic failures on 31 Dec 1999.
- Paul