I don't think he's suggesting to definitively turn (possibly) large chunks of code into string evals and otoh diotalevi is not likely to do anything like that - unless it's for an astonishing trick of his, that is!

I think he's suggesting to trick perltidy temporarily. I don't use perltidy myself, but my editor generally does a good job automatically indenting the code for me. However for Perl that's hard and occasionally fails. In those cases I insert comments and trick it into thinking the code is somewhat more "regular" than it actually is, so that it can indent it nicely. Then I undo the local modifications.