I think that qq is correct in that we've all done a lot of that (certainly look a few years ago and I've got some examples of that), and that it is helpful for learning.

A couple things bug me about what you've suggested however. First, you say that you're a beginner programmer. Yet, you also say that you weren't particularly impressed with the available date modules. My guess is this stems from some unfamiliarity with their methodology. Date::Calc is pretty unintuitive, but it certainly gets the job done. Additionally, it's pretty fast. Going pure-perl, and going it alone, is almost certainly going to be slower and harder to work with. Date::Calc is also very mature, having gone through many spirals and thousands of use scenarios.

Anyways, I wanted to suggest that you could take another look at Date::Calc. You'll probably find that it's easier to work with other people's code when you're more familiar with it. The other thing I wanted to suggest is if you work with databases, they generally have very helpful date functions, with casting into all sorts of different types. They're also generally a lot faster than perl (I do try to offload everything I can onto the database, rather than let the host machine spin on perl).

* http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/functions-datetime.html

Toodles, dep