I am trying to write a perl script which can compress a perl script without breaking it. Its job is to remove comments, new line characters, and unnecessary whitespace.

Why?

Just for fun or education? That would be ok.

But I see no other reason for doing so. 180 kByte floppy disks are gone since decades, commonly available mass storage is in the GByte or TByte range, so there is no shortage of disk space. Perl's compile phase won't be speed up significantly by stripping whitespace and comments. Any kind of electronic transmission can be significantly accelerated by applying state of the art compression (e.g. bzip2, lzma) before transmission. (Just for fun: Current CGI.pm has 123 KBytes, gzip compresses that to 36 KBytes, bzip2 and lzma even down to 32 KBytes, all without any loss of information!)

Minimizing and transparent compression, as usual for jQuery and others, does not make sense for anything but web browsers. And running perl in a web browser is possible, but anything but common.

So what's left? Creating a maintainance nightmare, just because you can?

Or did I miss something?

Alexander