title: Why was "new Date(int year, int month, int day)" deprecated?
body: <p>My application I've recently inherited is FULL of deprecation warnings about the constructor:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Date d = new Date(int year, int month, int day)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Does anyone know or can point to a reason why something as simple as this was "replaced" with something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Date d = null;
  Calendar cal = GregorianCalendar.getInstance();
  cal.set(1900 + year, month, day);
  d = cal.getTime();
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now, obviously deprecation warnings are not a problem in themselves, but can you imagine the millions of LOC that would be crying out in agony if this constructor was ever removed?</p>
  
  <p>In my brief little play at benchmarking, the latter takes about 50% more time to execute.</p>