Compared Against Imperative and Procedural Programming
The notion of state is not exclusive property of automata-based programming. Generally speaking, state (or program state) appears during execution of any computer program, as a combination of all information that can change during the execution. For instance, a state of a traditional imperative program consists of
- values of all variables and the information stored within dynamic memory
- values stored in registers
- stack contents (including local variables' values and return addresses)
- current value of the instruction pointer
These can be divided to the explicit part (such as values stored in variables) and the implicit part (return addresses and the instruction pointer).
Having said this, an automata-based program can be considered as a special case of an imperative program, in which implicit part of the state is minimized. The state of the whole program taken at the two distinct moments of entering the step code section can differ in the automaton state only. This simplifies the analysis of the program.
Read more about this topic: Automata-based Programming
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