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Why does JKI State Machine course tell us to add states to the front of the queue?


trobertson79

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I was surprised to hear in the state machine course the best practice of adding states at the front of the state queue.   I've always added them at the back under the theory that I'm "queuing up" states to be run, but I don't want to hijak the order of exectution if there's already seme states enqueued.   The only time I add to the front is in an interrupt type situation.  Can someone explain why adding to the front would be considered best practice?

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Hi @trobertson79. It's a great question!

The sort of simple answer is this:

In most programming situations, the developer should pick one way or the other (either add to front or add to back).  Mixing front and back is a recipe for hard debugging. And, since the template already enqueues at the front then this is why we recommend to stick with that.

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  • 3 months later...

Suppose you have an architecture where states calls sub states to do the details of the action then you have to queue to the front.

Example of a motor stage with a break: Top level commands queued are
1) Move_To_Pos >> A
2) Move_To_Pos >> B

where state
Move_To_Pos (PosArg)               issues the actual string of commands or  states:
     Break >> Off
     Goto >> PosArg
     Break >> On

The initial queue after 1), 2) are queued will be:
(Front) Move_To_Pos >> A; Move_To_Pos >> B (tail)
which if you use add to front of queue gets expanded to 
(Front) Break >> Off;  Goto >> A; Break >> On; Move_To_Pos >> B (tail)
and if using add to tail:
(Front) Move_To_Pos >> B; Break >> Off;  Goto >> A; Break >> On;  (tail)
And this gets replaced with
(Front) Break >> Off;  Goto >> B; Break >> On; Break >> Off;  Goto >> A; Break >> On; (tail)

As you see the sequence of positions will be  B then A and not as the example presumes A then B

So for the concept of subroutine-like states to work you have to add to front.

Edited by heel
premature submit
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On 8/21/2020 at 11:04 PM, heel said:

Suppose you have an architecture where states calls sub states to do the details of the action then you have to queue to the front.

Example of a motor stage with a break: Top level commands queued are
1) Move_To_Pos >> A
2) Move_To_Pos >> B

where state
Move_To_Pos (PosArg)               issues the actual string of commands or  states:
     Break >> Off
     Goto >> PosArg
     Break >> On

The initial queue after 1), 2) are queued will be:
(Front) Move_To_Pos >> A; Move_To_Pos >> B (tail)
which if you use add to front of queue gets expanded to 
(Front) Break >> Off;  Goto >> A; Break >> On; Move_To_Pos >> B (tail)
and if using add to tail:
(Front) Move_To_Pos >> B; Break >> Off;  Goto >> A; Break >> On;  (tail)
And this gets replaced with
(Front) Break >> Off;  Goto >> B; Break >> On; Break >> Off;  Goto >> A; Break >> On; (tail)

As you see the sequence of positions will be  B then A and not as the example presumes A then B

So for the concept of subroutine-like states to work you have to add to front.

Sorry my conclusions are incorrect - please ignore the posting.

Reason: The last replacement when going from:
(Front) Move_To_Pos >> B; Break >> Off;  Goto >> A; Break >> On;  (tail)
should also obey the "add to tail" to become:
(Front) Break >> Off;  Goto >> A; Break >> On; Break >> Off;  Goto >> B; Break >> On; (tail)
which gives the same result as when add to front. Only difference would be seen if there were other items in the queue.

Edited by heel
clarification
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