The idea is that the combinational machine will act as a one-shot device such that, when the signal turns on, the machine will immediately turn it off again. This practice should be avoided: It is prone to ambiguous interpretation, and if the one-shot action is needed, it can be provided unambiguously by a sequential machine.

the knee of a graph

New in Henry's first French war were almain rivets, mass-produced South German plate body armours (see Fig. 3.3). The king himself ordered 2,000 of them in 1512 and his subjects soon began to catch up.

A higher-order function is a function that operates on other functions instead of on data values. Some of these take data arguments and manufacture functions to order; others, like the imap() function of Chapter 4, transform one function into another one.