is sorting a list of integers (0..$#a) corresponding to the indices of the elements of your array @a. Recall that within
code blocks, $a and $b are special variables representing the two variables to be ordered each time the block is evaluated. So here,
means sort the indices of the array by the contents of its elements.
It's a bit confusing in this case because of the use of @a as your array variable and the use of $a and $b as special variables to
.