The Douglas-Peucker line simplification algorithm has been around for more than 25 years, yet is still is the best method of polygon and line simplification available.
We are proud to announce the release of Open Source code for this routine written in Perl. This has been done before, but not a port that doesn't require any additional modules. This code should run on just about any version of Perl without modification.
See Douglas-Peucker for the code and a sample driver program.