Automatic checking of the correctness of students' solutions of programming exercises for generating appropriate feedback is a necessary component of interactive programming learning environments. Although there are multiple ways of specifying such a check, ranging from mere string patterns to code written in general-purpose programming language, they all have their deficiencies, with the check specification being too verbose, too complicated, difficult to reuse, or very limited in its expressive capabilities. In this paper, a new language designed especially for this purpose is described. It provides both extension and replacement for RegEx-based pattern specification so that checks typical for programming exercise verification can be expressed in a concise and highly-readable manner.
@InProceedings{swacha:OASIcs.SLATE.2017.6, author = {Swacha, Jakub}, title = {{Exercise Solution Check Specification Language for Interactive Programming Learning Environments}}, booktitle = {6th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2017)}, pages = {6:1--6:8}, series = {Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-056-9}, ISSN = {2190-6807}, year = {2017}, volume = {56}, editor = {Queir\'{o}s, Ricardo and Pinto, M\'{a}rio and Sim\~{o}es, Alberto and Leal, Jos\'{e} Paulo and Varanda, Maria Jo\~{a}o}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2017.6}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-79413}, doi = {10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2017.6}, annote = {Keywords: automatic programming exercise solution verification, source code pattern specification, RegEx extension, RegEx alternative} }
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