Definition: formal language

[Patrick Durusau <Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org>]

Greetings!

The term for the day is: formal language.

No luck with the usual suspects (indexed and non-indexed terms).

As much as it is bandied around you would think there would be a quick 
and concise definition, but I have not come across one.

Taylor in Models of Computation and Formal Languages, notes:

"The term 'formal' is introduced in order to distinguish such languages 
from natural languages, programming languages, and so on. It is in fact, 
possible to regard natural languages such as Spanish and programming 
languages such as PROLOG as formal languages, provided one ignores their 
semantic aspects." (p. 5)

I would suggest something along the following lines:

formal language: An artificial language that is used to investigate teh 
  properties of languages in general. As distinguished from natural or 
programming languages that have other primary uses.

Captures the notion that the language is not a "natural" one, i.e., 
artificial, and notes that it has a primary purpose other than use as a 
programming language.

Started to say something about how a formal language has a finite set of 
rules that can generate an infinite number of strings from a finite 
alphabet, which obviously excludes even verbose programming languages 
but did not think it would add anything to the definition.

Lars: Do you want to take a crack at it?

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model

Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!