Perl Object Environment: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 09:24, 20 October 2006

Revision as of 20:16, 15 November 2006

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(...and remember Perl's Motto: "There's more than one way to do it" per [[Larry Wall|Larry]])

The Running Kernel operates through primordial [[finite state machine]]s constructed from another set of abstractions ruled by the '''POE::Session''' architecture. A POE::Session is almost trivially defined as a map of events to the functions, class [[Method (computer science)|methods]], and/or object methods that handle them. POE::Session objects also contain a storage space shared by all its event handlers, called a [[heap (programming)|heap]]. Any way you slice them the states are solidly identified and clearly defined.

A more featureful [[event handler]] is a POE::Session subclass called '''POE::NFA''' - an event-driven [[Nondeterministic]] [[finite set|Finite]] [[Automaton]] (a ''smarter'' finite state machine). This event handler moves from one strictly defined state to another as events, polls, user selections, or other external events require. This [[state machine]] acts to encapsulate a wide range of generic [[event driven]] [[thread (computer science)|thread]]s allowing much tight tracking along the [[execution path]] than the relatively informal POE::Session.