Preface

History

Writing a good program is not a simple process. The program behavior is hardly predictable, so, to gain more control of program execution, it is advisable to use tools, which allow to make it graphic. My chief gained some info about finite state machines and advised me to read book "The SWITCH technology" by Shalyto. There I have seen a way to use finite automatas for general programming. I have written a first version of finite state machine editor for Flora system. It was ugly. It was buggy. But Programs made with this editor were stable. Then I rewrote the editor using automata tecnology. Then I started an open-source project. There are simular principles in it, but it's written in another language, and runs in different environment than it's commercial analog.

Here is a first release of FSME. There are a lot of ideas to be implemented, but it's quite usable right now.

Some parts of FSME are made with FSME itself.

To version 1.0 FSME has grown to 3 branches:

• FSME — a Finite State Machine Editor. It is used to design Finite State Machine. FSM description is stored in XML file, which is language and platform independent.
• FSMC — a Finite State Machine Compiler. It is used to make source code from XML description. By now, generators to C++ and Python exist.
• FSMD — a Finite State Machine Debugger/Tracer. It is used to monitor Finite State Machines in realtime. Just pipe program to fsmd and inpect everything in graphic.

How to

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