Assign automatically hundred of bitmaps to hundred of materials

Hi!
I'm building a Material Library for trees and plants in 3ds max.
What I'm doing is to put manually a bitmap into the diffuse and opacity channel of the material.
Well, I've a lot of bitmap and a lot of materials to create, so this procedure it's quite long and tedious, I'd like to know if it could be done automatically,
I don't know, maybe a sort of script that point to a folder with textures named in this way: diffuse01.jpg, diffuse02.jpg... and when I click "Start" it creates a series of materials caleed Mat01 Mat02.. and it applies automatically diffuse01.jpg to the first and so on.. and using a cycle "for" I can decide the number of materials.

Thank you for any kind of help.
I hope someone else has had the same issue :) (and has solved it)