> explaining the practical uses of sequential machines in programming? A better known term is "Finite State Machine". These are very useful constructs in general programming (you can google them -- our J OMS used one for order state management).
J's sequential machine dyad ;: uses FSMs to tokenize strings. It's intended (and commonly used) to to parse user data, implement a DSL, etc. Of course, like any primitive, you can get creative with it. For example, I once used it to calculate some statistics about family size, and produced a solution 3 OOM faster and 2 OOM leaner than the "obvious" way I'd tried before. Not that I'd have retained the ;: in production (the cost of maintenance would be too high), but it was a fun exercise. -Dan [1] http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/general/2005-August/024064.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
