Jeremy Hylton writes:

I have to admit that I'm a bit unclear on the motivation for all this. As Gordon said, the state machine approach seems like it would be a good approach.

For simple problems, state machines are ideal. Medusa uses state machines that are built out of Python methods. But past a certain level of complexity, they get too hairy to understand. A really good example can be found in /usr/src/linux/net/ipv4. 8^) -Sam