[newbie/2.5.1.1] Computing value of a word?

[Gilles Ganault]

Hello,

For a game, I need to go through a wordlist, and for each word,
compute its value, ie. a=1, b=2, etc.

So for instance, NewYork = 14 + 5 + 23 + 25 + 15 + 18 + 11 = 111.

Before I write the obvious While loop to go through each line in the
input text file, I was wondering if Python didn't already have some
function to perform this type of computation.

Thank you.