note Arunbear A nearly verbatim translation to Ruby: <code> $rtoa = { :M=>1000, :D=>500, :C=>100, :L=>50, :X=>10, :V=>5, :I=>1 } def roman_to_dec(roman) roman.split(//).map { |c| $rtoa[c.upcase.to_sym] }.reduce { |t, n | t+n-t%n*2 } end %w[ XLII LXIX mi ].each { |r| puts roman_to_dec r } </code> 771219 771219