• MJ (34/34) May 18 2019 Anyone have any nice, generic and very simple state machine

MJ <MJ gmail.com> writes:

Anyone have any nice, generic and very simple state machine 
design patterns in D?

Basically one someone specifies the state transition matrix and 
callbacks in a very simple and direct way.

Using a struct itself is rather straightforward but requires 
boilerplate code. This could be removed by making it more generic.

I think the idea would be to specify an enum that represents the 
states, then an nxn matrix that maps the current state to the 
future state with each entry holding a delegate would be auto 
generated. One then just passes the new state to a function that 
does the rest...

Not to hard to code but curious if there already exists something 
that works well and is very easy to use.

Also, ideally, I'd like to be able to compose state machines 
which is a state machine itself but it allows multiple state 
machines to be active.

For example, I might have a state machine for the mouse, which is 
3 state machines(or more), one for each button. Another state 
machine for the keyboard. Generally the states machines are 
independent. When certain combinations of states occur, the state 
machines interact and create new state transitions.

For example, if ctrl is pressed without any key, a state in the 
keyboard SM, and the left mouse is pressed, a state in the mouse 
SM, then one has a higher order combinational state that is 
transitioned too.

The problem is that this gets very complex to deal with quickly 
since combinations grow exponentially. Hence a very regimented 
and efficient way is required. When we program, we are usually 
working in these state machine patterns but without the pattern 
but it usually is efficient since we only handle the transitions 
we care about.

E.g., we might not want to store a transition for every keyboard 
combination, might be 10's of thousands of combinations possible. 
Therefore, rather than a N-D matrix it would be a list.