On any code-review, I would give thumbs-up to the “state-machine driven” approach, and I always thumbs-down the use of Perl flip-flops. They are one of the very few “IMHO, really bad ideas” in this language, although there is nothing to be done about them now (except to not use them). At one time, they might have been seen as desirable because they let you feed a few fewer inches of paper-tape into your teletype machine, but to me they are extremely obtuse. You cannot readily look at the statement and see what it is going to do, well, “next.” Nor why.
The other approach, on the other hand, is both perfectly-clear to read, and easily maintainable. First, the logic decides what to do next, based only upon what it sees and upon the value of variables whose values can easily be printed. (There are no “side effects.” It’s all right there in front of you.) Then, separately, it carries out the appropriate action for that case. What will the behavior be? It’s clear. How do I change it, and how to I demonstrate its new correctness? Again, clear. That’s the kind of code you want to be in your repository.
