This has been discussed before (link anyone?)
I read previous discussions and Q&As at this site before I posted. Some of the Q&As were just verbatim copies of the standard perlfaq man pages!

I appreciate your suggestion, but I'd hoped there was a better solution. I'll keep it as a last resort though.

I have no problem with compiling into C, when I said I didn't like it, I meant for coding. If the code produced by perlcc compiled by me just typing:

gcc -I /include/path/ whatever.pl.c -o mybinary.exe

then I'd be very happy. But I get compiler errors. Perlcc does not even appear to be writing syntactically valid code!