Control logic is a key part of a software program that controls the operations of the program. The control logic responds to commands from the user, and it also acts on its own to perform automated tasks that have been structured into the program. Control logic can be modeled using a state diagram, which is a form of hierarchical

state machine A finite-state machine (FSM) or finite-state automaton (FSA, plural: ''automata''), finite automaton, or simply a state machine, is a mathematical model of computation. It is an abstract machine that can be in exactly one of a finite number o ...

. These state diagrams can also be combined with

flow charts A flowchart is a type of diagram that represents a workflow or process. A flowchart can also be defined as a diagrammatic representation of an algorithm, a step-by-step approach to solving a task. The flowchart shows the steps as boxes of va ...

to provide a set of

computational semantics Computational semantics is the study of how to automate the process of constructing and reasoning with semantics, meaning representations of natural language expressions. It consequently plays an important role in natural language processing, nat ...

for describing complex control logic. This mix of state diagrams and

is illustrated in the figure on the right, which shows the control logic for a simple stopwatch. The control logic takes in commands from the user, as represented by the event named “START”, but also has automatic recurring sample time events, as represented by the event named “TIC”.

References

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