Finite-State Automaton To/From Regular Expression Visualization
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arXiv
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| Hauptverfasser: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2024
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| _version_ | 1866913426783076352 |
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| author | Morazán, Marco T. Minić, Tijana |
| author_facet | Morazán, Marco T. Minić, Tijana |
| contents | Most Formal Languages and Automata Theory courses explore the duality between computation models to recognize words in a language and computation models to generate words in a language. For students unaccustomed to formal statements, these transformations are rarely intuitive. To assist students with such transformations, visualization tools can play a pivotal role. This article presents visualization tools developed for FSM -- a domain-specific language for the Automata Theory classroom -- to transform a finite state automaton to a regular expression and vice versa. Using these tools, the user may provide an arbitrary finite-state machine or an arbitrary regular expression and step forward and step backwards through a transformation. At each step, the visualization describes the step taken. The tools are outlined, their implementation is described, and they are compared with related work. In addition, empirical data collected from a control group is presented. The empirical data suggests that the tools are well-received, effective, and learning how to use them has a low extraneous cognitive load. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_08088 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Finite-State Automaton To/From Regular Expression Visualization Morazán, Marco T. Minić, Tijana Formal Languages and Automata Theory Graphics Human-Computer Interaction Programming Languages Most Formal Languages and Automata Theory courses explore the duality between computation models to recognize words in a language and computation models to generate words in a language. For students unaccustomed to formal statements, these transformations are rarely intuitive. To assist students with such transformations, visualization tools can play a pivotal role. This article presents visualization tools developed for FSM -- a domain-specific language for the Automata Theory classroom -- to transform a finite state automaton to a regular expression and vice versa. Using these tools, the user may provide an arbitrary finite-state machine or an arbitrary regular expression and step forward and step backwards through a transformation. At each step, the visualization describes the step taken. The tools are outlined, their implementation is described, and they are compared with related work. In addition, empirical data collected from a control group is presented. The empirical data suggests that the tools are well-received, effective, and learning how to use them has a low extraneous cognitive load. |
| title | Finite-State Automaton To/From Regular Expression Visualization |
| topic | Formal Languages and Automata Theory Graphics Human-Computer Interaction Programming Languages |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08088 |