correct way to do state machines in elisp?

[Jonathan Walther]

I have written a bot in C; source here:
   http://reactor-core.org/linuxos/bot.c

As I was writing it, I couldn't help thinking, there must be a way to
write the same thing in LISP, with 1/3 the lines of code.  The largest
guzzler of lines of code I think is the state machine that parses every
RFC compliant IRC message into a suitable structure.

Can anyone give me hints about how the same thing could be done better
in elisp?  I'm reluctant to use regular expressions for this.

Jonathan

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