Finite State Machine : the basics

Mells

Hi community,

I'm trying to implement a basic finite state machine in my app.
My question is about the logic behind this system.

What would be the logical way to do between :

local firefly = Firefly.new("firefly1") local stateLightsOn = State.new("LIGHTS_ON") firefly:setState(stateLightsOn)   -- then Choice 1 firefly:onEnterState(stateLightsOn)   -- or Choice 2 stateLightsOn:onEnter(firefly)

atilim

I would choose

firefly:setState(stateLightsOn)

Also your states can be simply strings instead of objects:

firefly:setState("LIGHTS_ON")

(it's a matter of taste)

Teranth

@atilim agree entirely it's very much a personal choice as to how you want your state machine to work. (And yeah strings are the way to go, or at least they have been for me heh)

bowerandy

@Mels, have you tried any of the FSM implementations suggested on the Lua wiki. I came across this one that looks interesting:

http://lua-users.org/wiki/FiniteStateMachine

Actually, there is a modified version of the same thing on GitHub that might be better:

https://github.com/cornelisse/LuaFSM

As it mentions in the text, the beauty of this scheme (courtesy of Lua's table mechanism) is that the states and events can be of any type, including tables and functions if required.

Best regards

Teranth

@bowerandy great share, I couldn't remember where I had seen a LUA FSM example, you got it

Mells

Thank you very much, very helpful.