.usno.navy.mil>http://tycho.usno.navy.mil
and their definitions of "Systems of Time" at:
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/systime.html
In all methods of class Date
that accept or return year, month, date, hours, minutes, and seconds values, the following representations are used:
- A year y is represented by the integer y
- 1900
. - A month is represented by an integer from 0 to 11; 0 is January, 1 is February, and so forth; thus 11 is December.
- A date (day of month) is represented by an integer from 1 to 31 in the usual manner.
- An hour is represented by an integer from 0 to 23. Thus, the hour from midnight to 1 a.m. is hour 0, and the hour from noon to 1 p.m. is hour 12.
- A minute is represented by an integer from 0 to 59 in the usual manner.
- A second is represented by an integer from 0 to 61; the values 60 and 61 occur only for leap seconds and even then only in Java implementations that actually track leap seconds correctly. Because of the manner in which leap seconds are currently introduced, it is extremely unlikely that two leap seconds will occur in the same minute, but this specification follows the date and time conventions for ISO C.
In all cases, arguments given to methods for these purposes need not fall within the indicated ranges; for example, a date may be specified as January 32 and is interpreted as meaning February 1.
@author James Gosling
@author Arthur van Hoff
@author Alan Liu
@version 1.84, 11/23/06
@see java.text.DateFormat
@see java.util.Calendar
@see java.util.TimeZone
@since JDK1.0