We actually have a great tool to manage state, but nobody seems to have used it to its full potential: regular expressions.
Imagine your program is a big state machine, and inputs and other events are making it transition from one state to another, and when in a state the apropos actions are performed. On this view, your program just is a regular expression parser--the tokenized stream of input events is what it is parsing.
And what is a great, high-level way of describing a parsing state machine? Yup--a regular expression. When compiled, a regular expression is translated into a state machine. However, you can't really specify that an arbitrary procedure is called when it enters a state--it can only do limited actions, e.g. extract a substring.
If we could let the compiled state machine call arbitrary procedures when it enters a state, well, we'd have a new program-control-flow statement. A super-duper if/then/else.
Instead of writing state charts--absolutely the lowest level you can program a state machine at--we could specify the state machine in a very high-level, easier to understand and maintain way.
Imagine your program is a big state machine, and inputs and other events are making it transition from one state to another, and when in a state the apropos actions are performed. On this view, your program just is a regular expression parser--the tokenized stream of input events is what it is parsing.
And what is a great, high-level way of describing a parsing state machine? Yup--a regular expression. When compiled, a regular expression is translated into a state machine. However, you can't really specify that an arbitrary procedure is called when it enters a state--it can only do limited actions, e.g. extract a substring.
If we could let the compiled state machine call arbitrary procedures when it enters a state, well, we'd have a new program-control-flow statement. A super-duper if/then/else.
Instead of writing state charts--absolutely the lowest level you can program a state machine at--we could specify the state machine in a very high-level, easier to understand and maintain way.