First: I second Utilitarian's (implied) advice re hashes.

Second: The shebang line is unnecessary under windows unless you have trailing modifies ( like  -T or  -w ) and definitely doesn't need escaped backslashes.

Third: these are a couple ways to do PART of what your code tries to do -- count the words.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use 5.016;
use strict;
use warnings;
#1018535 

=head  NO ARRAY METHOD  (everything between here and the =cut line is 
+commented out)

my $count;

while ( <DATA> ) {
    for ( $_ =~ /\w+/g ) {
        $count++;
    }
}

print "COUNT:  $count\n";

=cut     END of (POD-syntax code which is tantamount to a)  multi-line
+ comment

# you could stuff the individual (not necessarily unique) words into a
+n array, this way:
# ie, this uses an ARRAY. Run the code to see what's happened here.

my $i = 0;
my ( $count, @count);

while ( <DATA> ) {
    for ( $_ =~ /(\w+)/g ) {
        push @count, "$_ $i";
        $i ++;
    }
}

for $count(@count) {
    say "Array element is: $count";
}

__DATA__
This these that the and how who writ this code
how now brown cow
the fox jumped into the hencoop
the lazy brown dog was azleep.
[download]

Note that the highest numeric value from the array method is 25, even though there are 26 words in the __DATA__ section. Look at the first value of the output and you'll find a zero... which is the way array elements are denominated -- the first element is $array[0].

If you wish to see the NON-ARRAY method used, move the =head and =cut down to surround the second (and currently operative) code. The data section must, of course, stay outside this hackish method of doing a multi-line comment in a script.

BUT, to identify and count unique words using the commonly recommended approach, use a hash.

And finally, if by any chance you mean you're seeing things like HASH(0x213F7) when you mention "numeric values," (though I don't see why) what you're seeing is effectively a pointer to the memory where the actual values are stored; to understand that (and how to get the actual values) you'll need to study referencing and dereferencing, in our estimable Tutorials section.

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