[ragel-users] Nested machines to make a HSM?

[B. Estrade]

On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 12:16:26PM -0500, Chuck Remes wrote:
> 
> I'm currently reading "Practical Statecharts in C/C++" by Miro Samek  
> which was suggested on this list some months ago. It is blowing my mind.
> 
> I'm curious to know if it is possible to use ragel to nest multiple  
> machines so that behavior is inherited as described in that book.
> 
> If you haven't read the book, I'll give a quickie explanation. Imagine  
> an oven that has 4 states:
> 
> Heating
> 	Baking
> 	Toasting
> Door Open

> 
> The Baking and Toasting states are substates of the Heating superstate  
> because they exhibit different behavior though both require the  
> heating element to be on. If the machine is in the Toasting state and  
> it receives a door opened event, it transitions to Door Open. Toasting  
> has no exit action of its own; it inherits an exit action  
> (TurnOffHeatingElement) from its superstate, Heating.
> 
> So, much like we have encapsulation and inheritance in OOP, a  
> hierarchical state machine allows substates to inherit behavior from  
> superstates. Here endeth the quickie overview. I hope it made some  
> sense.
> 
> Is this kind of inheritance (or chain of responsibility-ish) behavior  
> possible in ragel? If so, how would one achieve it?

I admittedly don't know how to do this in Ragel (it's been a while since I played with it), but you can set up the heirarchy from a symbol/transition view using a regular expression.

So, if you look at it as a regex, it is something like:

H(B+T)D + D

This accepts:

HBD
HTD
D

Of course, you have to define what the valid order of things might be, otherwise you could get something super general like:

((H(B+T))*D)*

Brett

> 
> cr
> 
> >