It's interesting to contrast this design with what Rob Pike presented in his talk on the Go template lexer. Some differences: (1) Pike's is more static: there

It's interesting to contrast this design with what Rob Pike presented in his talk on the Go template lexer. Some differences: (1) Pike's is more static: there is no Machine struct and states are identified with handlers so that there is no table lookup in the loop. (2) Pike chose to go with a modifiable lexer struct rather than threading a cargo value through the machine. (3) Pike used nil for all end states. The main design questions are probably: (a) Do you need to construct machines at runtime? (b) Do you need state names available at runtime?