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Computer language syntax is generally distinguished into three levels: Words – the lexical level, determining how characters form tokens; Phrases – the grammar level, narrowly speaking, determining how tokens form phrases; Context – determining what objects or variables names refer to, if types are valid, etc.
In linguistics, syntax (/ ˈ s ɪ n t æ k s / SIN-taks) [1] [2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences.Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), [3] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning ().
In logic, syntax is anything having to do with formal languages or formal systems without regard to any interpretation or meaning given to them. Syntax is concerned with the rules used for constructing, or transforming the symbols and words of a language, as contrasted with the semantics of a language which is concerned with its meaning.
Syntax was recognized as the focal point of language production, in which a finite set of rules can produce an infinite number of sentences. Subsequently, morphology (i.e. the study of structure and formation of words) and phonology (i.e. the study of organization of sounds in languages) were relegated in importance. [94]
A language that supports the statement construct typically has rules for one or more of the following aspects: Statement terminator – marks the end of a statement; Statement separator – demarcates the boundary between two statements; need needed for the last statement; Line continuation – escapes a newline to continue a statement on the ...
Phrase structure rules are a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language's syntax and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957. [1]
The natural-language supplement provided specific details of the language class semantics to be used by a compiler implementation and a programmer writing an ALGOL program. Natural-language description further supplemented the syntax as well. The integer rule is a good example of natural and metalanguage used to describe syntax:
The two characters commonly used for this purpose are the hyphen ("-") and the underscore ("_"); e.g., the two-word name "two words" would be represented as "two-words" or "two_words". The hyphen is used by nearly all programmers writing COBOL (1959), Forth (1970), and Lisp (1958); it is also common in Unix for commands and packages, and is ...