4 ms·

> turns it into some sort of ugly state machine Why are people afraid of state machines? There's been sooo much effort spent on hiding them from the programmer

• matheusmoreira 7mo ago
  They're essentially callable, stateful, structured gotos. Difficult to understand for the uninitiated. For example, generators. Also known as semicoroutines. https://langdev.stackexchange.com/a/834 https://langdev.stackexchange.com/a/834 This: generator fib() { a, b = 1, 2 while (a<100) { b, a = a, a+b yield a } yield a-1 } Becomes this: struct fibState { a, b, position } int fib(fibState state) { switch (fibState.postion) { case 0: fibState.a, fibState.b = 1,2 while (a<100) { fibState.b, fibState.a = fibState.a, fibState.a+fibState.b // switching the context fibState.position = 1; return fibState.a; case 1: } fibState.position = 2; return fibState.a-1 case 2: fibState.position = -1; } } The ugly state machine example presented in the article is also a manual implementation of a generator. It's as palatable to the normal programmer as raw compiler output. Being written in C++ makes it even uglier and more complicated. The programming language I made is a concrete example of what programming these things manually is like. I had to write every primitive as a state machine just like the one above. https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/delimited-continuations-in-lone-lisp https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/delimited-continuati...
  • nottorp 7mo ago
    What you've given is an example of how to implement a coroutine though. Not of how to write a state machine based application without hiding the state machine behind abstractions.
• tliltocatl 7mo ago
  Because they are unstructured and non-modular. And yes, graphical notation sucks.