This is a set of routines designed to make any common date/time manipulation easy to do. Operations such as comparing two times, calculating a time a given amount of time from another, or parsing international times are all easily done. Date::Manip deals only with the Gregorian calendar (the one currently in use). The Julian calendar defined leap years as every 4th year. The Gregorian calendar improved this by making every 100th year NOT a leap year, unless it was also the 400th year. The Gregorian calendar has been extrapolated back to the year 1000 AD and forward to the year 9999 AD. Note that in historical context, the Julian calendar was in use until 1582 when the Gregorian calendar was adopted by the Catholic church. Protestant countries did not accept it until later; Germany and Netherlands in 1698, British Empire in 1752, Russia in 1918. Note that the Gregorian calendar is itself imperfect. Each year is on average 26 seconds too long, which means that every 3,323 years, a day should be removed from the calendar. No attempt is made to correct for that. Date::Manip is therefore not equipped to truly deal with historacle dates, but should be able to perform (virtually) any operation dealing with a modern time and date. Among other things, Date::Manip allow you to: 1. Enter a date and be able to choose any format conveniant 2. Compare two dates, entered in widely different formats to determine which is earlier 3. Extract any information you want from ANY date using a format string similar to the Unix date command 4. Determine the amount of time between two dates 5. Add a time offset to a date to get a second date (i.e. determine the date 132 days ago or 2 years and 3 months after Jan 2, 1992) 6. Work with dates with dates using international formats (foreign month names, 12-10-95 referring to October rather than December, etc.). Each of these tasks is trivial (one or two lines at most) with this package. Although the word date is used extensively here, it is actually somewhat misleading. Date::Manip works with the full date AND time (year, month, day, hour, minute, second). WWW: http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~sbeck/