Add terminal states to TKStateMachine.

[ipmcc]

This patch adds the ability to specify terminal states for the machine. Once the machine transitions into a terminal state it will refuse to fire any more events. Patch also includes assorted other fixes (like eliminating the use of property setters in -init and transitioning off of shouldBeNil/shouldNotBeNil which are deprecated in Kiwi).

[blakewatters]

Should probably be isTerminated

[ipmcc]

I don't feel strongly. I deliberated
this a bit myself, but I felt like if it wasn't just "terminated" that it
should really be "hasTerminated" but that doesn't really go with the naming
convention. I guess terminated isn't a great word... maybe finished would
be better... shrug

[blakewatters]

What's the use case on this?

[ipmcc]

I was trying to come up with a way of nesting state machines. Specifically,
I needed a way to tell the parent when the child reached a terminal state.
While I was able to achieve this by setting didEnter blocks on all the
terminating states in the child, it felt awkward, and it kinda ruins the
encapsulation/reuse benefits of the nested state machine, by strongly
coupling the child to the parent. Adding a first class API for "terminated"
gives an abstract/generic way to detect that the state machine has entered
a terminal state without the block coupling the parent and child machines.
(i.e. KVO on the terminated property or using the NSNotification.) I toyed
with the idea of adding a didTerminate block property, but concluded that
just moved the coupling and didn't eliminate it.

[blakewatters]

Shouldn't this be TKStateMachineDidTerminateNotification ?

[ipmcc]

Yes indeed.

[blakewatters]

I did some more thinking on this:

Couldn't the terminalStates property be eliminated by evaluating whether or not there are any exit events from the current state? This would eliminate the need for explicit configuration. We could instead add a method:

- (BOOL)isTerminalState:(TKState *)state;

that introspects the transitions from the state to determine if it is indeed terminal. From there, we can emit the terminated error by evaluating if [self isTerminalState:self.currentState].

I would probably also add the willTerminate and didTerminate blocks to the state machine.

[ipmcc]

This wouldn't work in the face of events with nil for sourceStates which I was using -- that's why I didn't go this way initially.

[blakewatters]

I wonder if this doesn't argue for eliminating the support for nil as a value for source state. That would make the implementation more closely model a traditional state machine and is only slightly more configuration, while being much more explicit. I don't love the idea of adding the terminalStates property to support both of these features in parallel.

[blakewatters]

I would like to revive this terminal state work for TransitionKit 3.0 by removing support for nil source states and using introspection of the available transitions.

[jhollida24]

The idea of nested machines is a good one and I would love to revive this conversation, unless there's something easy I'm missing to accomplish that another way.

@blakewatters, is this something you're still considering?