Hello, friends. :) I'd like to add some humble points of view on the FSM discussion: What I usually do is a conversion from a NFA to a DFA and then apply a state minimization algorithm. What sometimes comes back to haunt me is the fact the in a DFA we have a transition function which has to be total by definition, so we might end up with a converted DFA which has 2^n states in the worst case, an the number of transition might end up being way greater than the number of states. This is not a problem in a DFA since we have a transition relation, but as the name suggests, we need to deal with nondeterminism. I think we have benefits and shortcomings in both situations. I'm pro DFA, but the construction is quite time-consuming. One possible alternative is to use a NFA and applying Thompson's construction or a similar algorithm, but it's been a while since I had fun with them. :) Knowing Bruno, he is probably taking all these performance tricks into consideration. :) After all, Bruno is the optimization master. :) All the best, Paulo