> Software types are likely to cheat and cause their code to break by doing
    > things only when a state is entered or exitted.

    AS as "software type", I usually create three states in such cases: One
    for the "entry" state, one for "polling, looping, etc", and one for the
    "exit" state.

Yep.  That'd be the "pure" state machine...


    I don't know if *this* is cheating or not, but sometimes the next state
    to be transitioned to from the current state depends on the previous
    state.

That's cheating too.  Actually, it sounds like a particular case of
entry cheating (steady state means that the previous state is the
current state, right?  So special state entry code is the same as being
dependent on the previous state...)

BillW