This is actually a rather strange idea in Perl.
And I figure syntactically incorrect.

Normal would be:

 
@ranks= sort { my ($A) = (split($a,'')))[0];
               my ($B) =  split($b,'')))[0];
               $A[0] <=> $B[0]
              }@ranks; 
               #sorts on numeric comparison
               #between item's [0] in the @ranks array
             }
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