Programming Riddle: How might you translate an Excel column name to a number?

Question

I was recently asked in a job interview to resolve a programming puzzle that I thought it would be interesting to share. It\'s about translating Excel column letters to actu

Answer 1

Read a column name from STDIN and print out its corresponding number:

perl -le '$x = $x * 26 - 64 + ord for <> =~ /./g; print $x'

Caveats: Assumes ASCII.

EDIT: Replaced " with ' so that your shell won't interpolate $x in the string.