If you're trying to count the number of occurrences of each array element, what you want is:

my @array = qw( a b r a c a d a b r a );

my %counts;
++$counts{$_} for @array;

for my $key ( sort { {$counts{$b} <=> $counts{$a} } keys %counts ) {
    print("$key: $counts{$key}\n");
}
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