note 52005 added to function.date

Could someone please explain the reason why the date functions in php, in particular date(), revolve around unix timestamps which are only useful for dates between 1970 and 2038. This seems a somewhat archaic system that is impractical for many solutions e.g. family mappings and trees where dates can go back centuries (my own family history dates back to the 12th century!) Can anyone tell me if there are any functions or libraries available for some date functions that are not dependant in unix timestamps? I would like a function to format a date based on the input of three parameters: (date, format1, format2) where date is the date to be formatted, format 1 is the format of the supplied date and format2 is the format required. Ok so simple date formats like dd/mm/yyyy are simple to code myself but I would like a reliable function that can handle the full array of date formats including long day and month names etc. ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php Edit -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=edit+52005 Delete: added to the manual -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+52005&report=yes&reason=added+to+the+manual Delete: bad code -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+52005&report=yes&reason=bad+code Delete: spam -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+52005&report=yes&reason=spam Delete: useless -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+52005&report=yes&reason=useless Delete: other reasons -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+52005&report=yes Reject -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=reject+52005&report=yes Search -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php