I get the feeling, looking at
$alpha = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz';
that it could be done in some much smarter way, but I can't think what exactly; any ideas?
I could use an array for the alphabet, @alpha = (a..z); but I can do the equivalent of substr() on an array, what's the equivalent of index() when it comes to arrays?
This implementation doesn't preserve case, can anyone see an easy way to make it preserve case?