7.8 State Machines and Indirect Jumps
Another control structure commonly found in assembly language programs is the state machine. A state machine uses a state variable to control program flow. The FORTRAN programming language provides this capability with the assigned goto statement. Certain variants of C (for example, GNU's GCC from the Free Software Foundation) provide similar features. In assembly language, the indirect jump can implement state machines.
So what is a state machine? In very basic terms, it is a piece of code that keeps track of its execution history by entering and leaving certain "states." For the purposes of this chapter, we'll just assume that a state machine is a piece of code that (somehow) remembers the history of its ...
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