Hmmm, a couple of questions readily present themselves:

• Why the bespoke AS perl ? and...
• What's the basis for your aversion to C ?

Presumably, the answer to the latter is the perceived requirement for VC++ or similar and all the attendant expense, disk space and other troubles...

Why not try Strawberry Perl(5.8.8 still available for download) - it comes bundled with GNU make and gcc and ... better still, allows you to use the standard CPAN based download &/or installation of modules (& their dependencies).

To my mind, that (Strawberry Perl) and gvim (not forgetting a live inter-web connection, for convenience:-) make the bes6t of bad job and present the best possible perl dev environment on Windoze