One big problem with porting anything Unix-ish to the Palm is its segmented memory architecture. Memory lives in segments that can only be up to 64K (it was, I believe, 32K in earlier versions of the PalmOS). Because of this, anything that has big tables (like the yacc-based parser in Perl) would have to be re-written to accomodate the chunked memory.

Additionally, there are lots of Unix-isms in the Perl source code. Like assuming that you have files, for instance, or directories. Or, for that matter, that there are standard streams connected to a spawned program.

I looked at porting Perl to the Windows/CE OS and found that the Unix-isms would have taken some working around. The current port of Perl to WinCE provides its own console so it can simulate file redirection (which doesn't exist on PocketPC architecture).

You may be better off looking at one of the cross-compiler environments if you just want to write Palm apps (I'd recommend PocketSmalltalk, but that's just one of many).