I really cannot think of a good reason why someone would want to hide their Perl source code. Certainly any hacker who would take the time to study someone else's Perl algorithms (since they are done at such a high-level anyway) in order to reverse-engineer the solution would already possess the ability to code it originally.

The only code that I ever felt necessary to hide would be machine-specific assembler stuff, but even that runs contrary to my Open Source philosophy.

Ray.