14 Syntax Check Exercises
Chapter 1 of the Carnap book includes exercises that require identifying the main connective of a formula and of its sub-formulas in order to break that formula down into atomic sentences. This helps students learn how sentences are structured by connectives.
To add a formula-parsing exercise of this kind, use the classes SynCheck (to indicate that you’re checking syntax) and Match to indicate that you want to display as many parentheses as possible.
So, following text:
~~~{.SynChecker .Match}
1.1 P /\ Q /\ R
~~~will generate:
1.1 is a problem number that will be used to save the problem when the student submits it, and P /\ Q /\ R is the formula to be parsed.
In Chapter 2 of the Carnap book, this exercise is repeated, but with some parentheses omitted by the precedence rules for the Boolean connectives. For a formula parsing exercise more like the chapter 2 problems, just change Match to MatchClean, so that you write:
~~~{.SynChecker .MatchClean}
1.2 P /\ Q /\ R
~~~The result will be
14.1 Syntax Check Options
You can require explicit “parsing of atoms” (pressing return with when an atom is highlighted to acknowledge that it contains no connectives) by including adding parseAtoms in the options attribute. So for example,
~~~{.SynChecker .MatchClean submission="none" options="parseAtoms"}
1.3 P->Q
~~~Generates