What does Y2K compliance mean?

Question

I read the basics of the Perl programming language, and I came across the following statement

Perl is Y2K compliant. 

I did not quite understand what this meant even after some Googling. This is some kind of standard. if so, by whom? Any information appreciated.

Answer 1

For those who programmed in the late 1990s, Y2K was crucial. Literally: Y2K = Year 2000 .

Software that was not compatible with Y2K, apparently, included software that stored the year digits as two digits (often to save storage space) and therefore would equate 2000 to the year 1900. However, some software products for other reasons did not meet the Y2K requirements because they made incorrect date calculations for dates in the 21st and subsequent centuries.

In the last category, I had one product that I supported at a time when I had to fix it because he did not recognize the year 2000 as a leap year. Since this software controlled the automatic control system at the factory, it would have damaged some expensive components if it had not been fixed before the end of February 2000.

There were some apocalyptic forecasts that January 1, 2000 would be very bad due to software crashes due to a mismatch in 2000, and many people “delayed” it at midnight on December 31, 1999 for this reason. After that, many argue that forecasts were exaggerated. In my opinion, there were few problems, because many programmers worked very hard and for a long time in the late 1990s specifically to deal with the threat of problems in 2000, and they would not have done this if there weren’t legitimate concerns about the potential very bad results.

Answer 2

The Wikipedia article on the Y2k issue, 2000 , explains this pretty well:

In 1997, the British Standards Institute (BSI) developed a standard, DISC PD2000-1, which defines "2000 Compliance Requirements" as four rules:

• An invalid date will interrupt operations.
• The calculation of the duration between date pairs or a sequence of pairs will be correct whether dates will be in different centuries.
• In all interfaces and in the entire storage, the century must be unambiguous, either given or calculated by the algorithm
• 2000 should be recognized as a leap year.

Perl, compatible with Y2k, means that its built-in date processing complies with these rules.