Calendars in Java are completely unintuitive.

[caibbor]

I'm a C++ programmer, rewriting some programs in Java to port them to android. I've read whatever documentation I could find regarding the various Calendars in the Java standard library, but things just aren't working for me.

in this snippet, I create a new calendar object and set it's year with two different methods, but neither actually work. the year that gets spat from println is always 1. what the heck is going on?

		GregorianCalendar cal = new GregorianCalendar();

		cal.set(cal.YEAR, 1999);
		System.out.println("> " + cal.YEAR);

		cal.set(1999, 10, 10);
		System.out.println("> " + cal.YEAR);

[Norm]

println is always 1

What is the value of what you are printing: cal.YEAR?
It looks like a static constant the way it is coded: All caps
Read the Calendar class's API doc to see what it is defined as.

[caibbor]

ah, so it is. here's the corrected code:

		cal.set(GregorianCalendar.YEAR, 1999);
		System.out.println("> " + cal.get( GregorianCalendar.YEAR ) );

		cal.set(1999, 10, 10);
		System.out.println("> " + cal.get( GregorianCalendar.YEAR ) );

reference: Calendar (Java 2 Platform SE 5.0)