Anything that hold states is a state machine and usually finite.
derek-zhou
Vidar
I disagree that everything holding state is a state machine. For example you mentioned booleans and enumerations earlier yourself as means to encode state. Those are clearly not state machines by themselves but do hold state.
Usually finite is almost a bit philosophical. Usually is a difficult to quantify, but given that we model most things digitally these days that might be true for digital human made systems at some level. For state in the real continous physical world I really doubt most things are finite.
Anyway, it seem unlikely we will find common perspective on this so I’ll stop here.
0