Its been said many times on perlmonks that using linked lists in perl is often the application of C programming style to perl. For perl, we seem to idomatically use hashes or lists instead. That being said, the ord call only returns the numeric value of the first character, and since as noted in other posts, text numbers in perl are quite magical in the sense that you can use ++ and other math operations on them and perl just Does What You Meant(tm)
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Jay "Yohimbe" Thorne, alpha geek for UserFriendly