** PD/Shareware / 325 Words **

Roman 1.7  79%
** AC exclusive **
** On Reader Disk **

Utility, all Ataris
Matthias Jaap
http://www.atari-computer.de/mjaap/prg/
mjaap@atari-computer.de

Way back when northern Europeans were living in mud huts the Romans made their way north in a forcible attempt to convert everyone to their way of doing things. Unfortunately, for the Romans at least, they eventually encountered some stiff resistance and returned home to their marble palaces in the warm Mediterranean sunshine. So what did the Romans ever do for us? Well, apart from decent roads, proper stone buildings and aqueducts they left us with a seriously whacky form of writing the date!  Amazingly this has survived into modern times largely thanks to television producers who often date their work using roman numerals - presumably so mere viewers can't figure out just how old those BBC repeats really are!

For anyone who fell asleep during this particular history lessons, "Sit up properly Kerslake" the Romans used letters of the alphabet in place of Arabic numerals to date things, for example: I=1, V=5, X=10 and so on. Apart from being incredibly cumbersome, the Roman system didn't include a symbol for zero, which makes computation very difficult!

Anyway, you can now convert between Arabic (decimal) numbers and Roman numerals thanks to this little utility programmed by Matthias Jaap. Simply enter a decimal or roman number then click the Calculate button and hey presto the opposite format is displayed.

The fields can be copied to the clipboard for use in other applications and the program is quite polyglot in that you can choose between English, German and Dutch languages to appear in the dialog boxes.

It's one of those utilities you'll find a use for once you've got it - although, at risk of looking a gift horse in the mouth, a CPX version would be even better.

Mike Kerslake (aged XXXVIII and a quarter)

** ROMAN.GIF **
Come to ACC'MCMXCIX - Nah, we'll stick with ACC'99