But do you honestly believe that the casual user will be able to do that?

Yes. Especially since I just showed them how to do it.

Do you know how safes are rated? Based on how long it takes to break into them. The point of a safe is to delay the attacker long enough for other measures to take effect (such as the cops responding to the alarm).

The same applies here. The purpose of hiding code is to make it cost prohibitive for someone to use the code instead of writing it from scratch. perlc doesn't do that.

Secondly, I've been told multiple times that I am misleading people.

That may be, but not by me. My comments have been about the tool, not you. Besides, I believe you think your tool has worth.

I highly recommend that anyone who is comfortable with hiding their script from casual users, feel free to use perlc!

I highly recommend that noone use perlc. The recommendation isn't based on politics; it's purely a comment on the quality of perlc.

there are ways to disassemble C and even convert it back into C code.

Ok, let's compare perlc against C decompilation. (It's not disassembly if it doesn't produce assembler.) perlc returns the original code intact. Decompilation loses formatting, comments, variable names, function names, function calls, etc, etc. By your own metric, perlc fails miserably.

There is no guaranteed answer to hiding your code.

Noone has faulted it for not doing that.

You're welcome to write something better. :)

No thanks. This is based on politics.