Date::Gregorian - Gregorian calendar
====================================

Copyright (c) 1999-2002, Martin Hasch <martin@mathematik.uni-ulm.de>.
All rights reserved.

Version
-------

This is Version 0.05 of Date::Gregorian.

DSLI status
-----------

bdpO (beta, developer, perl, object-oriented)

License
-------

This package is free software; you can distribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself.

This package is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
license information that came with your Perl kit for more details.

Description
-----------

Date::Gregorian performs date calculations, similar to Date::Calc
by Steffen Beyer.  However, it has a pure object-oriented interface,
it does not use C code, and it extends the Gregorian calendar beyond
some configurable date in the past by its predecessor, the Julian
calendar.  See the inline POD documentation for more details.

Y2K compliance
--------------

This package does not use nor permit two-digit abbreviations for
four-digit year numbers anywhere.  In fact, it is designed to deal
with dates in many different centuries.

Prerequisites
-------------

Perl 5.

Installation
------------

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

Changes
-------

Since its first release, no major changes have been made to the
module's interface.  For a detailed history of changes, see the
Changes file.

Future enhancements
-------------------

Less limited locale support and/or more functionality to deal with
regional calendar variations might be added some day.

You should not expect substantial speed optimizations, however.
Consider some plain functional implementation heavily using table
lookups rather than integer arithmetic, and of course XS code, if
you really have to economize on milliseconds.

Disclaimer
----------

Most of the code provided here is now quite old in terms of software
development.  It has been maintained mostly to avoid migration
issues in other software and only marginally for any merit of its
own.  While the author appreciates any efforts to improve existing
user interfaces rather than create new ones, this contribution
certainly falls short of doing so.  It is released in order to make
publicly available what was once useful for some people, but without
having had the time nor claimed authority to thoroughly counter-examine
and discuss most of the known alternatives.  Still, the author will
be happy to consider suggestions for improvement or learn that it
has in fact become obsolete.

