#        1         2         3         4
#23456789_123456789_123456789_123456789_1234
$_=pop;y/A-Z/:-T/;$?=36*$?-48+ord for/./g;$?
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-Blake

I wrote it as a function.

The function should be usefully callable multiple times.

Since you're well past my meagre 59 (from the use.perl thread), I might as well show it:

$_=shift;y/0-9A-Z/\0-#/;(s/.//,($a*=36)+=ord)while length

Yes, no output-- the game rules were unclear that way, too. Using your tricks I can get down to -- 43.

$_=pop;y/0-9A-Z/\0-#/;($a*=46)+=ord for/./g

If only the null byte were legal in y///, then the above could become 42...

-- jhi

Assuming that 46 is a typo...

($a*=36)+=ord   # 13 chars
$a=$a*36+ord    # 12 chars
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But as you say, the rules are rather murky, so its tough to judge what qualifies as a solution and what doesn't.

-Blake

-jackdied

y is a function which is explained in perlop. What it does is substitutes for any character in one list, the corresponding charater on another list.

What I did was use ord and chr to figure out what the ASCII representation of 9 was, and what came right after that. Then I used tr to move the range A-Z so that they came right after the range 0-9, so that I could convert any digit into a number just by taking ord and subtracting off the ord of 0.