On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 11:32 PM, Matty Sarro <msa...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hey everyone. I am currently reading through an RFC, and it mentions > that a client and server half of a transaction are embodied by finite > state machines. I am reading through the wikipedia article for finite > state machines, and sadly it's going a bit above my head. I don't > really have a background in engineering, and would really love to > understand what is being said. Does anyone have a simple way to > explain it?
Sure. You have a program (the machine) that can be in any one of a number of states, and has well-defined rules that shift it from one state to another. For instance, suppose you want to build a parser that handles a simple "name = value" notation. Your states are: 1) Reading name 2) Reading value In state #1, finding an equals sign transitions you to state #2. In state #2, finding end-of-line transitions you to state #1 (and, presumably, saves the name/value pair somewhere). This is an extremely simple example with two states and two transitions. It can get a lot more complicated than that! Hope that helps! Chris Angelico -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
