© John T. Taylor, Wayne T. Taylor 2021
J. T. Taylor, W. T. TaylorPatterns in the Machinehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6440-9_10

10. Finite State Machines

John T. Taylor1   and Wayne T. Taylor2
(1)
Covington, GA, USA
(2)
Golden, CO, USA
 
State machines, or finite state machines (FSM), are handy-dandy tools for providing a deterministic framework for your application to deal with asynchronous behaviors. These are things like

  • Software timers

  • Communication protocols

  • Hardware interrupts

  • User events

  • Polled events

Here is a good, general-purpose definition of what a state machine is:

A finite-state machine (FSM) is a mathematical model of computation . It is an abstract machine that can be in exactly one of a finite number of states at any given time. The FSM ...

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