Abstract: An oscilloscope includes an input port to receive an input signal, a trigger system coupled to the input port and operable to generate a trigger signal in response to detecting a trigger event in the input signal, the trigger system includes at least one finite state machine, and a snippet compiler configured to accept one or more Declarative Trigger Language (DTL) code snippets as an input, compile the one or more DTL code snippets into one or more state machine op codes, and output the one or more state machine op codes. The trigger system uses the one or more state machine op codes to configure the at least one finite state machine.

Abstract: A test-and-measurement instrument is described. A state machine, corresponding to a regular expression, can be stored in the test-and-measurement instrument. The state machine can be modified to reflect a trigger condition received from a user. The modified state machine can then be used to invoke a trigger when the condition is met in the bits of a bit stream.