State (computer programming)
In computer programming, state refers to the content of memory locations at any given point in a computer program's execution.
Description
Imperative programming is a programming paradigm (way of designing a programming language) that describes computation in terms of the program state and statements that change the program state. In contrast, in declarative programming languages the program describes the desired results, and doesn't specify changes to the state directly.
A more specialized definition of state is used in some computer programs that operate serially (sequentially) on streams of data, such as parsers, firewalls, communication protocols and encryption programs.
Serial programs operate on the incoming data characters or packets sequentially, one at a time. In some of these programs, information about previous data characters or packets received is stored in variables and used to affect the processing of the current character or packet. This is called a "stateful protocol" and the data carried over from the previous processing cycle is called the "state". In others, the program has no information about the previous data stream and starts "fresh" with each data input; this is called a "stateless protocol".
See also
External links
- State (computer science) @ Wikipedia
