My second grader came home today with a bizzare homework problem:

Using a simple substitution cipher, where A=1, B=2, etc., define the value of a word to be the sum of its letters.

So far, so good.

But the assignment was to come up with a word ... worth exactly 65 points.

Really? C'mon, that's work for a computer, not a human.

Specifically, work for Perl. More specifically, a one-liner.

Which means it's good for a little golf! Here's my offering, finding 65-point words in the unix dictionary, in 93 bytes:

#23456789_123456789_123456789_123456789_123456789_123456789_123456789_ +123456789_123456789_123 perl -nle '$t=0;for $n (0..(length()-1)){$t+=(ord(lc substr($_,$n,1))- +96)}print if $t == 65;' /usr/share/dict/words

Update: Huge thanks to everyone who participated! I learned something new from each and every entry, which was at once rewarding and humbling. May I never stumble across any of this in production code! :-)


In reply to Homework Golf by McD

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