Not much help, but I want to mumble something about this looking like a radix sort. Consult your friendly neighborhood algorithms book for possibly more enlightenment.

Update: Frell, you people are harsh. :) From MAwP, the example in question is ch04/radix-sort and you can grab the sample code tarball.

Update redux: And if you want that to deal with more-than-one-letter per slot you'll probably have to use something like below rather than just calling ord().

my $val = 0;
$val = $val * 10 + substr( $cur, -1, 1, undef ) while $cur;
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