Hello Romans :-)

I have done a solution to work with romans for the pleac cookbook 
project, see:

http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_ruby/numbers.html
section "Working with Roman Numerals"

It does also the opposite conversation. I have looked at other solutions 
in other languages before writing this, and was quite happy to came up 
with this algorithm, because it is so simple. And ruby lets me write 
things like "2004.to_roman".

The pleac project is also a great way to compare phyton and ruby, if 
somebody is still interrested in this.

Karsten Meier