[_giu]

I'm studying CS (in switzerland) and we've learned about state machines during a mathetmatics lecture in the second semester. that's it. since I didn't take the compiler class, this was the only lecture in which state machines were covered.

I personally think it's important to know about state machines. at least once in a lifetime you are going to write a DSL or parse specific input, and these are use cases were the application of state machines is pretty useful.

oh and by the way: Zed has written a nice tutorial about finite state machines, called "A Painless Introduction To Finite State Machines" and located at http://lamsonproject.org/docs/introduction_to_finite_state_m... . it's worth reading it if you're interested in the subject!