Regular Expressions in a CS Formal Languages Course

Marco T. Morazán
(Seton Hall University)

Regular expressions in an Automata Theory and Formal Languages course are mostly treated as a theoretical topic. That is, to some degree their mathematical properties and their role to describe languages is discussed. This approach fails to capture the interest of most Computer Science students. It is a missed opportunity to engage Computer Science students that are far more motivated by practical applications of theory. To this end, regular expressions may be discussed as the description of an algorithm to generate words in a language that is easily programmed. This article describes a programming-based methodology to introduce students to regular expressions in an Automata Theory and Formal Languages course. The language of instruction is FSM in which there is a regular expression type. Thus, facilitating the study of regular expressions and of algorithms based on regular expressions.

In Elena Machkasova: Proceedings Twelfth International Workshop on Trends in Functional Programming in Education (TFPIE 2023), Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 12th January 2023, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 382, pp. 45–63.
Published: 14th August 2023.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.382.3 bibtex PDF
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