Within computer science, state is a construct inside automata theory which occasionally extends into occasionally forms of systems programming such as lexers and parsers.

Whether a automaton around wonder occurs as finite state machine, a pushdown automaton or a good-fledged Turing machine, a state occurs as particular placed of videos which is executed inside response to the machine's input. the state may be thought of when correspondent to a practical computer's independent memory. a behavior of a patterns occurs as work of (a) a definition of the automaton, (b) the input & (c) the todays state.

An information system or protocol that relies upon state is said to be stateful. Of these that doesn't is said to exist as homeless. E.g., there are stateless firewalls and stateless servers, and HTTP is considered a homeless protocol. The character encoding such as ISO 2022 is said to be stateful whenever the interpretation of a particular code value depends on the code values that precede it.