Thanks for following up on my chatterbox inquiry!

This is how I tried to use most_frequent().

my @array= qw ( this that the the other this the off );

print most_frequent(@array),"\n";

sub most_frequent
{
  local *_=*_;
  $_[$_{$_}] = $_ for map{$_{$_}++; $_} @_;
  $_[-1];
}
[download]

The result printed is off instead of the expected the. Am I missing something?

Update: I have benchmarked merlyn's code, Petruchio's CB suggestion, and the Statistics::Frequency approach. The clear winner is merlyn's code. It is faster and uses less memory than the other approaches.

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma