(copy ikegami) and: I imagine you want my not local. You rarely, if ever, want local. You also seem to be missing a closing brace.

I was trying to reformulate this as a Schwartzian transform, but I'm confused about what it is that you're sorting. I'd expect something like this to work, but it wont if you're comparing the distance between $a and $b -- what would the usefulness of that be?

    my @sorted_points =
        map  { $_->[0] }
        sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] }
        map  {[$_, dist($_, $reference_point)]} 
        @points; # points is an AoA structure
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