In Japan the Gregorian calendar is widely used, but some conservative
folk insist on counting years from the beginning of an emperor's reign.
These conservative people have much political clout and they have made
a law making it mandatory to use the Japanese era name, or gengo, in
official contexts.
("Gengo" is the Japanese reading of Mandarin Chinese "yuanhao".
Yuanhao were used in China during the imperial ages, to 1912.
"Reiwa" is "Linghe" in Mandarin.)
This year, 2023 AD (or CE) is year Reiwa 6. It is also year Showa 99,
Showa being the era name of the reign of Emperor Hirohito (1925-1989).
Before the 1990s it was commonplace to express years in abbreviated
form, using only the last two digits; such practice led to the Year
2000 problem. Some Japanese programmers may have used two-digit Showa
years when writing system software. Any such software, if still in
use, will run into trouble come New Year's Day 2025.
Thorough inspections of system software were conducted as the January
1st of the new Millenium drew near. Probably many programs using
Showa years were mended at that time. But we can't be sure how many
went unchecked. Non-free software is difficult to analyze. A common
method of finding Year 2000 issues was running a test with the system
date set to some future date. This doesn't identify instances of
two-digit Showa years unless some date beyond 2025 is tested and in
practice dates that far in the future were seldom tried.
Many for-profit firms would rather not report issues they encounter
which are outside the scope of their assignments. Many programmers do
no more than they are ordered to do. The Chinese character for "rei"
in Reiwa means "order" or "command". Before Reiwa this character has
never been used in Chinese or Japanese era names. This is because the
chararcter "rei"/"ling" appears prominently in a phrase of "The
Analects" of Confucius which states that orders alone do not achieve
much beyond breeding the passive attitude described above.
As a computer programmer I would add that the orders we humans issue
are often in error.
---
There are reports that Debian is moving towards quitting Intel 32 bit
builds. One argument I've heard advocating for continuing support for
32 bit is that many systems will need to be tested as Janary 19 2038
approaches and it should be prudent to keep a full-fledged system
available until at least then.
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