An automat can be defined as a set of states, tasks and links between state. Each state perform a task and when the task is over, the automat go to the next state using a choosen link according to the result of the task.

I.1 First example

A menu is a simple example of automat. Using the following drawing, you can see an example of menu managment automat.

From the root menu state, you can choose one of the 3 choices and go either to menu 1, menu 2 or menu 3 state. Then, you can make a new choice and go to another state, etc ...

I.2 Other cases

Automats can be used easily each time a big task can be divided into small one with potential choices. In fact, if then else is nothing less than a 3 states automat, the first step is the condition and 2 other steps are the program executed if the condition is TRUE or FALSE.

Typical cases of automat can be seen in some servers or clients of network applications like NNTP or FTP servers and clients. In NNTP client, from the connection step to the download article step, the client can receive several error codes from the server and must have to choose according to user choice.

This library requires only few things:

• GLIB library version 1.2 or above
• XML library version 1.8.8 or above or XML2 libary.