Actually, there are people who reported to me that they prefer to use Date::Calc instead of Date::Manip, because Date::Calc is more compact, takes less time to load and is faster (because it is written in C, internally) than Date::Manip, even though Date::Manip is more powerful for instance in parsing dates (natural language constructs are possible) and in calculations involving business days. -- Steffen Beyer sb@engelschall.com