In the first two parts of this series I’ve introduced state engines and taken apart a specific instance of an engine. Now it’s time to tie together the design idea with approaches to building a variety of such engines.

Because the programming logic is in the state table, the engine can be fairly generic. That means it’s possible to create a state engine framework you can reuse for a variety of applications.

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Last time I introduced state engines and state tables. I showed parts of a simple implementation of one in Python. It parsed the language introduced in Little Programming Languages. This post continues that, so be sure you’ve read that first article.

I got as far as the state table implementing the process, and that’s where this post picks up. I’ll also get into the SourceReader class that does the heavy lifting.

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