Actually these probably refer to POE, a perl application kernel (it stands for "Persistent Object Environment") described here and here (easier).

It lets you build event-driven apps in Perl. Here is a neat paragraph about it.

The two special constants you mention are exported by POE and are references that let you access parts of what is a little Perl-based operating system for your application. For example the heap dataspace can be used to store information that you don't want to have Perl garbage collect away, such as the address and port of a client.

In the words of the POE manpage, 

# $_[KERNEL] is a reference to the program's global POE::Kernel
# instance; $_[HEAP] is the session's local storage; $_[SESSION] is
# a reference to the session itself.

[download]
You can use this information with object methods, so 
my $kernel = $_[KERNEL];
$kernel->run;

[download]
will start up the event loop and return when there are no more sessions to which events may be dispatched. The POE::KERNEL manpage has a list of such methods.

In reply to Re: newbie having syntax/variable problems by mattr
in thread newbie having syntax/variable problems by kvaishnav

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