A Design Recipe and Recipe-Based Errors for Regular Expressions

This article presents a novel framework to provide Formal Languages and Automata Theory students design support for the development of regular expressions.This framework includes a design recipe for regular expressions and a customized error messaging system.The error messaging system produces recipe-based errors that include the step of the design recipe not successfully completed.Furthermore, the error messages follow the established practices of being concise, succinct, jargon-free, and nonprescriptive.In addition, a shorthand syntax developed for writing unit tests is described.The in-class use of the design recipe is illustrated, two debugging sessions using the described system are discussed, and the implementation of the error messaging system is briefly sketched.