I enjoyed the Dataists' data-driven blog on the best numbers to choose in a Super Bowl betting pool. It reminded me of my recent investigation of which initials are most common.

Because the Dataists' blog featured an R function that converts Arabic numerals into Roman numerals, the blog post also reminded me that SAS has a built in format that does the same thing. The ROMANw. format makes it easy to convert everyday whole numbers into their Roman equivalent.

For example, here are a few numbers and their Roman counterparts:

data RomanNumerals;
input x @@;
n = x;
format n ROMAN8.;
datalines;
1 2 3 4 5 9 30 40 45 50 1999 2011
;
 
proc print noobs; run;

I've always wondered why SAS has this obscure format, but now I know of at least one useful application: using it to troll through Wikipedia to extract box scores from Super Bowl I through XLV.