You can't do the same thing as in C. But you can create a second array with the sorted indices:

my @A = qw(A C D D C D A G F);

my @sorted = sort { $A[$a] cmp $A[$b] } (0 .. $#A);

print @sorted,"\n";

print @A[$sorted[1] .. $#A],"\n";
print @A[$sorted[4] .. $#A],"\n";

# prints 
061423587
AGF
DDCDAGF
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