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formal language
Sign in to saveset of strings of symbols that may be constrained by rules that are specific to it; words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules
A formal language is a set of words made from letters of a specific alphabet, where each word must follow particular rules to be considered valid or "well-formed." Formal languages matter because they provide precise, rule-based systems for communication—from computer programming to mathematics—where clarity and lack of ambiguity are essential.
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Structure of the syntactically well-formed, although thoroughly nonsensical, English sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" (historical example from Chomsky 1957) In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of strings whose symbols are taken from a set called "alphabet".
The alphabet of a formal language consists of symbols that concatenate into strings (also called "words"). Words that belong to a particular formal language are sometimes called well-formed words. A formal language is often defined by means of a formal grammar such as a regular grammar or context-free grammar.