Maybe necessary to define one by the book, but not to put one into code. I've seen enough state machines in the wild that are just a dispatcher with a bunch of

Maybe necessary to define one by the book, but not to put one into code. I've seen enough state machines in the wild that are just a dispatcher with a bunch of functions mutating a single state variable. Whether we call these contraptions state machines or not is just quibbling. As others have pointed out, there are better ways to implement them; yet, I rarely come across those.