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Re: Specifying a state machine: ASCII-based languages

2006-09-15 01:11:34
On Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 05:00:20PM +0100,
 Stewart Bryant <stbryant(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote 
 a message of 56 lines which said:

Isn't there a suitable text based state description language
published by the CCITT that we can use 

Pointers are welcome but you probably mean SDL, aka Z.100
(http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/studygroups/com17/languages/Z100.pdf and
http://www.sdl-forum.org/).

There are already existing languages for state machines and all those
I know are displayed at http://www.cosmogol.fr/related.html.

rather than invent our own from scratch?

There are several reasons why none of them seemed useful for the IETF,
in the specific context of state machine description in the RFCs.

* several are not published as a stable standard (such as Graphviz or
SMC), so they cannot be normative references,

* those who are published as a standard are not always available
(Z.100 is an ITU standard and they do not publish everything freely,
the SDL forum publishes a non-authoritative version and even tutorials
are not freely available, see
http://www.iec.org/acrobat.asp?filecode=125).

* some are extremely complex, intended for a much more general use
(such as UML and SDL).

Ask yourself why no state machine in the RFC is described with these
languages. And why RFC 2360 does not mention them.


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