> Because I couldn't name any programming language people in use today that has no built-in date type.
But this isn’t true. COBOL 85 has builtin functions for representing dates as an integer from 1601 epoch. IBM mainframe COBOL supports two operation modes, ANSI-compatible mode in which those functions use the 1601 epoch, and IBM-compatible mode which use a 1582 epoch instead - https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.4?topic=options-intd...
A lot of COBOL software didn’t use the COBOL 85 date functions because it is so old it long predates COBOL 85, and also because old habits die hard and some COBOL programmers avoided using them.
COBOL 85 doesn’t have a date type per se, dates are either integers (count of days since epoch) or strings (YYYYMMDD). But, C’s ‘time_t’ isn’t really a separate type (in the sense that many other languages have them) it is just an alias for an integer type. So COBOL is closer to C on this than you might think
Which would be true if it's the case.
Because I couldn't name any programming language people in use today that has no built-in date type.