When people talk about state machines, do they mean deterministic finite automatons? Because i can see a lot of ubiquity in state transition tables in code, but less use in deciding whether to reject or accept a sequence of states which is essentially what a DFA does.
Not usually. "State machine" is typically used to refer to the more general concept of a finite state machine, which includes Mealy and Moore automatons. DFAs typically are not viewed as having an output (or arguably a single bit for the whole input sequence that represents acceptance), while FSMs can have outputs on each transition or in each state, which means it can induce some action.
No. They mean a set of states, a set of input symbols, a set of output symbols, an initial state, a transition function, and an output function. The output function maps from the state to the set of output symbols (or sometimes from the state and input to the output).
