The solution offered by ikegami is really the Right Thing here, but - just to be silly -

#!/usr/bin/perl -wl
use strict;

my @a;
$a[ord($_)-65]++ for <DATA>;
print "There are $a[$_] element(s) of ", chr($_+65) for 0..$#a;

__DATA__
A
B
C
D
A
B
A
C
A
D
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