Time to wave 2-Digit Years goodbye for good
This year, for the first time since 1919, there is a particular danger in abbreviating the year to two digits: the simplicity with which this can be exploited on written documents such as contracts, Wills, etc. Last year this was possible, but only if you wanted to back-date something by at least 20 years. “32?? Quartember 19” was easily changed to “32?? Quartember 1998” for example[0].
But this year one has a much wider usable range of mischief available: back-date by up to 20 years, forward-date by up to 79 years. A lease or contract specified as running out on “31?? December 20” could easily get modified post-signature and extended forwards to “31?? December 2099”. Or backwards to “31?? December 2000”.
Whilst such wet-signed contracts usually exist as two copies, one held by each party, the existence of an unambiguous version with a 4-digit year specified and an ambiguous version (which might have a different year, or might just not have had the year completed in erroneous haste) could raise interesting legal doubts.
Cost, Laziness, and Ambiguity
Writing the year as two digits has two roots: cost and laziness. In the 1950s when the COBOL programming language was designed, storage was very expensive. Every byte mattered. Even in the 1970s, the rental cost for RAM was about $15/month/KiB. So the language was defined to use two digit years. But now even my phone has 8GiB RAM and a TiB of storage. Cost is no longer a valid justification, although some of us who learned our programming the hard bare-metal machine-code way do hate to see wasted bytes[1] - but ambiguity and integrity issues are too high a price to pay for saving such tiny amounts.
Did we learn nothing from Y2K? It has been depressing seeing people getting back into the habit of writing two digit years.
If you really have to save those two characters, at least use Roman Numerals. That at least reduces the options for mischief down to 32 over the whole of the 2020s, and to just 19 in 2020 itself[2]. Plus at least it makes the fraudulent party work harder.
Maybe we could start the 2020s by finally kicking the 2-digit year habit? Let's actively avoid the Y2.1K problem in advance!
Footnotes
[0] See: Philip K Dick, “The Skull” for the origins of Quartember.
[1] I once had a graphical simulation programme published (must have been about 1982), complete with keyboard-seeded PRNG, for Conway's Game of Life. It was 160 bytes total size written for the Z80 CPU; ironically that would now fit in a single SMS
[2] Corrected from earlier version; forgot you can append an X, plus also from I-IX, to XX. But not XX since that would be XL.