Often at meetings you hear about people working at 98%, etc. The criteria used to assign these values is somewhat nebulous, and as you occasionally hear about values over 100%, it can't be very reasonable.

The algorithm is that you value an A at 1, B at 2, C at 3, etc. Just add up the characters and you get your value. The following script demonstrates this process in action, and running it is most enlightening about the ways of the world.

#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;

# Demonstration of how much various things are worth...
# A=1, B=2, C=3...
my %chr2val;

my $chr_value = 1;
for ('A'..'Z') {
  $chr2val{lc($_)} = $chr2val{$_} = $chr_value++;
}

my $value = 0;

# Illustrative examples if people haven't entered their own.
@ARGV = ("HARD WORK", "KNOWLEDGE", "ATTITUDE", "BULLSHIT") unless @ARG
+V;

foreach my $word (@ARGV) {
  my $value = 0;
  foreach my $char ($word =~ /\w/g) {
    $value += $chr2val{$char};
  }
  print "The value of '$word' is $value%.\n";
}
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