Greetings!

So, I have a problem at my current contract that proved to be surprisingly annoying, and my solution looks remarkably inelegant to me. So, I thought to myself: "I'll ask the perlmonks, surely someone will give me a 8 character regexp that solves my problem elegantly!" :)

I have a series of "alphabet based base-26" numbers... what do I mean by this? Well how about some examples so you get the idea...

Base-26	Base-10
a	1
z	26
aa	27
az	52
ba	53
zz	702
aaa	703

So, basically each position is a power of 26. Pretty reasonable... I wanted a sub that I could easilly pass a string, and receive the base 10 equivalent. The following is my sub and test program...

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;
use POSIX qw/ pow /;

sub convert_from_base26 {
   my ($total, $exp);
   my ($val) = @_;

   $total += (ord($_) - (ord('a') - 1)) * pow(26, $exp++)
      for split('', lc(reverse($val)));

   return $total;
}

print "Enter a value: ";
while (<>) {
   chomp;
   print convert_from_base26($_)."\n";
   print "Enter a value: ";
}
[download]

Although the code for the sub is relatively concise, it doesn't look like code I'd like to revisit (not to mention that I need to find a new sub name), as when I look at the code it's not "obvious" what is going on. I think the term I heard at one point that I loved was: "it has too many metasyntatic variables." So, monks... any ideas as to how I could write this to be a more elegant piece of code?