Compilation, obfuscation, encryption

It's interesting that we tend to use compilation as a proxy for encryption. It seems to me it would help clarify the system design of a language semantics and architecture if you separate the concerns of code ownership with performance. Compilation is primarily used to cache the transformation of one semantics into another--a partial evaluation of an interpreter. Using this as a weak encryption mechanism is pretty silly. If you want to encrypt program source, why not use real encryption? That way you can use whatever representation of the code you want; source, byte-code, microcode, whatever.