Greetings fellow monks,

I just finished an interesting coding problem for work. We have an online test-taking & grading system, and while doing some updates for it, I needed an algorithm that renders a numeric sequence in order by letter, regardless of the numbers within the sequence. For example:

5, 100, 2, 8, 40 ...becomes... B, E, A, C, D

After some tinkering, I came up with the following:

my @original_array = qw(5, 100, 2, 8, 40);
my @sequence;
my @ordered = sort @original_array;

for (my $y = 0; $y < scalar @ordered; $y++) {
  for (my $x = 0; $x < scalar @ordered; $x++) {
    push @sequence, $x + 1
      if ($ordered[$x] == $original_array[scalar @sequence]);
  }
}
my @letter_sequence = map { local $_ = $_; tr/1-9/a-h/; $_ } @sequence
+;
[download]

I was wondering if any of you all had encountered such a problem in the past and if so if you have any code for it that's shorter than what I've posted. The above works, as far as I can tell, but I have a sneeking suspicion that there's a much better way to write it. (Oh, and the @original_array will never be bigger than 9 elements.) Thanks.

gryphon
code('Perl') || die;