Creating Linked Lists in Python

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.2379.1237642733.11746.python-list at python.org>,
 Tim Chase <python.list at tim.thechases.com> wrote:

> In the past, I've done NFA with a state machine:

What I've done at times is have each state be a function.  The function 
returns an (output, next_state) tuple, and the main loop becomes something 
like this:

state = start
for input in whatever:
    output, state = state(input)

and the states look like:

def start(input):
   next_state = blah
   output = blah
   return (output, next_state)

It's not always the right organization (and is almost certainly not for 
machines with large numbers of states), but I've found it useful for a lot 
of ad-hoc file parsing that I've done.