Practical UML Statecharts in C/C++, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Standard State Machine Implementations

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.

— Niels Bohr

This chapter discusses standard state machine implementation techniques, which you can find in the literature or in the working code. They are mostly applicable to the traditional nonhierarchical extended finite state machines (FSMs) because hardly any standard implementations of hierarchical state machines (HSMs) are intended for manual coding.¹ Design automation tools often use standard state machine implementation techniques to generate code for hierarchical state machines. The resulting code, however, is typically intended not for manual maintenance but rather to be regenerated every time you change ...