How does date() help me work with formatting strings and numbers? How does sprintf() help me work with dates? I think this would be more misleading and confusing than anything.

Q: How does sprintf() help me work with dates?

A: From the sprintf page itself:

Example #9 sprintf(): zero-padded integers
<?php
$isodate = sprintf("%04d-%02d-%02d", $year, $month, $day);
?>

I agree to what requinix said, but the sprintf() man page already
lists number_format(), so I think that adding date() is
acceptable. Adding a link from date() to sprintf(), however,
appears to be rather pointless.

This bug has been fixed in the documentation's XML sources. Since the
online and downloadable versions of the documentation need some time
to get updated, we would like to ask you to be a bit patient.

Thank you for the report, and for helping us make our documentation better.