No Schwartzian Transform is required. Does Java let you easily sort ignoring case? How about by length?...

sort { $freq{$a} <=> $freq{$b} } keys %freq
sort { lc($a) cmp lc($b) || $a cmp $b } keys %freq
sort {
    length($a) <=> length($b)
 || lc($a) cmp lc($b)
 || $a cmp $b
} keys %freq
[download]

You might find that a ST executes faster for that second case (and you could almost certainly speed it up with one of several techniques that are faster in Perl than an ST), but I doubt the speed gain would be worthwhile since lc() shouldn't be that slow.

Speeding up the third case with a ST would be more difficult than using some other sort-speeding techniques (many of which have names that I don't recall). Though you'd have to have a whole lot of different words for the trade off of sort speed for code complexity to be a "win" here, especially since we are trying to write very maintainable code.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")