And here my version based on insertion sort, complete with random data generation and testing:

use strict;
use warnings;

sub nextrecord {
        return undef unless shift;
        # generate random records
        return { code  => join( " ", (int rand 10), (int rand 10), (in
+t rand 10), (int rand 10) ), 
                         score => rand };
}

my $keep = 10;
my $counter = 1000;
# initialize with the first 10 records sorted
my @largest = sort { $a->{score} <=> $b->{score} } map nextrecord( $co
+unter-- ), 1..$keep;
my @test = @largest; # for testing

while( my $next = nextrecord( $counter-- ) ){
        push @test, $next; # keep all for testing
        my $pos = 0; # insertion sort
        while(($pos < $keep) && ($largest[$pos]->{score} < $next->{sco
+re}) ) {
                $largest[$pos-1] = $largest[$pos] if $pos;
                $pos++;
        }
        $largest[$pos-1] = $next if $pos;
}
print map { "$_->{code}\t$_->{score}\n" } @largest;

# test
print "\n";
print map { "$_->{code}\t$_->{score}\n" } ( sort { $a->{score} <=> $b-
+>{score} } @test )[-10..-1];
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