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.