I have been thinking some more about how to improve ucf. One of the things that struck me was that based on my earlier analysis there are only five actions that ucf can take, and the decision about the actions depends on the state it finds the configuration file in on the target machine, and there are only eight of those. Now, thinking back to my days as a VLSI designer back in the halcyon days of electrical engineering, This is a pretty simple state machine. It is not as neat as it could be (where just three variables would be needed to keep track of things, but still, it bears investigation. This would be a way for converting the current procedural ucf into a functional programming model.

Hop over here for a look at how that went — it was fun, and afforded me an opportunity to demonstrate how well org handles snippets.