I'm not defending the difference between how months and days/years are treated. But here are some possible reasons. From ctime(3): Broken-down time is st

I'm not defending the difference between how months and days/years are treated. But here are some possible reasons. From ctime(3): Broken-down time is stored in the structure tm, which is defined in <time.h> as follows: struct tm { int tm_sec; /* Seconds (0-60) */ int tm_min; /* Minutes (0-59) */ int tm_hour; /* Hours (0-23) */ int tm_mday; /* Day of the month (1-31) */ int tm_mon; /* Month (0-11) */ int tm_year; /* Year - 1900 */ int tm_wday; /* Day of the week (0-6, Sunday = 0) */ int tm_yday; /* Day in the year (0-365, 1 Jan = 0) */ int tm_isdst; /* Daylight saving time */ }; Also, it allows you to do things like ["JAN", "FEB", ..., "DEC"][theDate.month]