Without trying to sound elitist, I would recommend going the long way and
starting to read a good introductory book on language theory and finite
automata. There you will learn about the three classes of language and the
what machines are needed to recognize them.
regular expressions via state machines
Class two langauge via the state machine with access to a stack
Turing machines via state machines + a stack and a tape read/write device
with an infinitely long tape loaded. Also the tape can only advance in
either direction by one unit and once there the tape can only be read or
written.
Anyways, the other way to go is to read the book on Regular Expreessions
by Friedl from O'Reilly. A truly excellent book on practical usage. The
trick that I see you needing is to be able to relate the state machines to
the regular expressions. One other note: Friedl provides truly excellent
treatment on the Other Kind of finite state machine; i.e., the
Non-Deterministic type. Most of what we do in our daily lives involves the
latter type.
--
-Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have -
-happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ
-Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all-
-individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question? [EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Thu, 10 May 2001, Joel Gwynn wrote:
=>Can anyone point me to some simple resources on
=>understanding/implementing state machines in Perl/SQL?
=>
=>I'm working on an ecommerce site and getting sick of all the standard
=>kludgy redundant code for maintaining state, session ID's etc. I keep
=>hearing that there are these things called "state machines" which will
=>auto-magically track all these variables.
=>
=>I need a fairly elementary primer with LOTS of examples.
=>
=>--
=>========[Joel-Gwynn]-[[EMAIL PROTECTED]]=======
=>A train station is where a train stops.
=>A bus station is where a bus stops.
=>So now you know why they call this a workstation.
=>
=>
=>
