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by arinlen 1354 days ago
> I'm not aware of sub-state-machines as a standard concept.

That just means you've never looked into it nor have much experience with state machines.

Sub-state machines are even supported as a basic features in some popular GUI frameworks such as Qt.

Qt in turn uses W3C's SCXML format[1] to represent state machines, which not only supports substates but also parallel states.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/scxml/

If anything, anyone with any experience writing any parser is already aware that the lexer represents a sub-state machine, and this is close to CS101.