Re: First JAPH - Spell perl in two hundred and eighty five thousand and seventy four easy steps

[/dev/null]

Great script!! It gave me plenty of pseudo-base 26 fun. The number is incremented exponentially as the number of characters increases. i.e. devnull in base 26 is:
 ((4*26**6) + (5*26**5) + (22*26**4) + (14*26**3) + (21*26**2) + (12*26**1) + (12*26**0))

The script I used to print the strings as they count:

use strict;
my $A="a";
my $Z = 0;
while($A ne "devnull")
{
   $A++;
   $Z++;
}
print"$A\n";
print"$Z\n";

It would be much easier/faster to add the string to hash, reverse the string in an array, and feed the numbers into the base 26 formula above. By the way, devnull is 1305384039 when the for loop starts at 1.