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The syntax of a language describes the form of a valid program, but does not provide any information about the meaning of the program or the results of executing that program. The meaning given to a combination of symbols is handled by semantics (either formal or hard-coded in a reference implementation ).
In programming language theory, semantics is the rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of programming languages. [1] Semantics assigns computational meaning to valid strings in a programming language syntax. It is closely related to, and often crosses over with, the semantics of mathematical proofs. Semantics describes the processes a ...
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.
When a programming languages has statements, they typically have conventions for: . statement separators; statement terminators; and; line continuation; A statement separator demarcates the boundary between two separate statements.
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).
Like natural languages, programming languages follow rules for syntax and semantics. There are thousands of programming languages [ 1 ] and new ones are created every year. Few languages ever become sufficiently popular that they are used by more than a few people, but professional programmers may use dozens of languages in a career.
This article describes the syntax and semantics of the purely declarative subset of these languages. Confusingly, the name "logic programming" also refers to a specific programming language that roughly corresponds to the declarative subset of Prolog. Unfortunately, the term must be used in both senses in this article.
Syntax is usually associated with the rules (or grammar) governing the composition of texts in a formal language that constitute the well-formed formulas of a formal system. In computer science, the term syntax refers to the rules governing the composition of well-formed expressions in a programming language. As in mathematical logic, it is ...