Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index In computer science, state is a concept in automata theory which occasionally extends into some forms of systems programming such as lexers and parsers. Whether the automaton in question is a finite state machine, a pushdown automaton or a full-fledged Turing machine, a state is a particular set of instructions which will be executed in response to the machine's input. The state can be thought of as analogous to a practical computer's main memory. the behavior of the system is a function of (a) the definition of the automaton, (b) the input, and (c) the current state. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.