| State (computer Science) |
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In Computer Science , state is a concept in Automata Theory which occasionally extends into some forms of Systems Programming such as Lexer s and Parser s. Whether the automaton in question is a Finite State Machine , a Pushdown Automaton or a full-fledged Turing Machine , a state is a particular set of instructions which will be executed in response to the machine's input. The state can be thought of as analogous to a practical computer's main memory. The behavior of the system is a function of (a) the definition of the automaton, (b) the input and (c) the current state. An Information System or Protocol that relies upon state is said to be ''stateful''. One that does not is said to be ''stateless''. For example, there are Stateless Firewall s and Stateless Server s, and HTTP is considered a stateless protocol. A Character Encoding such as ISO 2022 is said to be stateful if the interpretation of a particular code value depends on the code values that came before it. SEE ALSO |
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