Comment by billforsternz

I recall back in the day when I was an embedded systems programmer at the coal face I had similar antipathy towards a pattern. I think it was called the State pattern or similar. It involved a class hierarchy and virtual functions, one for basically every state, event pair.

I preferred my simple C design whic used a lookup table to quickly access a structure for each state, event pair instead. The structure would provide an output state, a message to send, an action to emit, a bitmask to select zero or more other standard operations, and yes a function to run in those rare cases where something really special was needed. All fields optional.

The point is I didn't need to write N x M functions, I just needed to edit a table. And I didn't need to understand any rocket science.