Not really.

To be frank, with any language its impossible. It may be boring to point out, but any computer program eventually tells a CPU to do something, and that can always be intercepted and monitored. So the issue is not "Can we prevent people from reverse engineering our code" but rather "can we make it difficult enough for them to do that they probably won't try, and even if they do the most likely wont suceed, at least not for all of it". Can the later problem be addressed? Probably it can be made fairly difficult. Many people consider perl2exe and similar stuff to offer a signifigant advantage. You could probably contrive some mechanism using encryption and a morphed perl binary to make it somewhat difficult. Source filters might stop the idly curious. Etc.

Ultimately however if someone with physical access to a machine wants to know whats running on the machine they can always find out.

--- demerphq
my friends call me, usually because I'm late....


In reply to Re: Encrypted Perl? by demerphq
in thread Encrypted Perl? by jens

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.