After running your version of the code on my machine I notice a couple of differences between your results and mine. When you print out the results of the compiled and deparsed macro, you get...

MACRO (COMPILED & DEPARSED): while ($var3 < $cons4) {
    $body6;
}
continue {
    ++$var5
}
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while I get...

MACRO (COMPILED & DEPARSED): $var1 = $cons2;
while ($var3 < $cons4) {
    $body6;
}
continue {
    ++$var5
}
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...I notice that the first line $var1 = $cons2; is missing in your report. And strangely enough there's a line is missing from your compilied and deparsed source code ...

SOURCE (COMPILED & DEPARSED): my $x;
while ($x < 8) {
    my $f = fact($x);
    print "factorial($x)=$f\n";
}
continue {
    ++$x
}
sub fact {
    $_[0] <= 0 and return 1;
    return $_[0] * fact($_[0] - 1);
}
'???';
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vs. my machine

SOURCE (COMPILED & DEPARSED): my $x;
$x = 0;
while ($x < 8) {
    my $f = fact($x);
    print "factorial($x)=$f\n";
}
continue {
    ++$x
}
sub fact {
    $_[0] <= 0 and return 1;
    return $_[0] * fact($_[0] - 1);
}
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...the $x = 0; has gone missing. So this causes $reorder to differ...

REORDER: $var3 = $1;$cons4 = $2;$body6 = $3;$var5 = $4;
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vs.

REORDER: $var1 = $1;$cons2 = $2;$var3 = $3;$cons4 = $4;$body6 = $5;$va
+r5 = $6;
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and is probably what causes the substitution match failure and thus you get the original code back. I don't know why lines would suddenly dissapear. Is it a buffering problem with the back-tick operator?

update:I'd try just running...

perl -MO=Deparse,-x9 -e'for($i=0;$i<10;$i++){$x++}'

...all by itself and see if it matches...

$i = 0;
while ($i < 10) {
    ++$x;
}
continue {
    ++$i
}
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That's straight from 3rd edition camel p. 480. Anyone else have any ideas? BTW, I'm running perl 5.6.1 under Slackware Linux