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In computer science, the syntax of a computer language is the rules that define the combinations of symbols that are considered to be correctly structured statements or expressions in that language. This applies both to programming languages, where the document represents source code, and to markup languages, where the document represents data ...
Languages support a variety of ways to reference and consume other software in the syntax of the language. In some cases this is importing the exported functionality of a library, package or module but some mechanisms are simpler text file include operations.
A programming language's surface form is known as its syntax. Most programming languages are purely textual; they use sequences of text including words, numbers, and punctuation, much like written natural languages. On the other hand, some programming languages are graphical, using visual relationships between symbols to specify a program.
The syntax of the Python programming language is the set of rules that defines how a Python program will be written and interpreted (by both the runtime system and by human readers). The Python language has many similarities to Perl, C, and Java. However, there are some definite differences between the languages.
John Backus, a programming language designer at IBM, proposed a metalanguage of "metalinguistic formulas" [2] [9] [10] to describe the syntax of the new programming language IAL, known today as ALGOL 58 (1959). His notation was first used in the ALGOL 60 report. BNF is a notation for Chomsky's context-free grammars.
A programming language specification can take several forms, including the following: An explicit definition of the syntax and semantics of the language. While syntax is commonly specified using a formal grammar, semantic definitions may be written in natural language (e.g., the approach taken for the C language), or a formal semantics (e.g., the Standard ML [3] and Scheme [4] specifications).
The syntax of the C programming language is the set of rules governing writing of software in C. It is designed to allow for programs that are extremely terse, have a close relationship with the resulting object code , and yet provide relatively high-level data abstraction .
The syntax of Java is the set of rules defining how a Java program is written and interpreted. The syntax is mostly derived from C and C++ . Unlike C++, Java has no global functions or variables, but has data members which are also regarded as global variables .