“Ahh, padewan, these are truly the Deep Mysteries of Perl! Must you venture hither?” The small little man tapped his cane meaningfully against the ground. “Many pilgrims before you have trod this ground before you, and all of them now have male pattern baldness... and Band-Aids® upon their foreheads!”

Yes, what you are looking at is a preprocessor input-file. But perhaps you can glean the insights that you need to know from what you have, without delving into how it is made. Also, the search.cpan.org website contains easy links to the source-code of any package, right there on the appropriate web page. If your quest is only for answers, perhaps you can discern what you need to know even from these...