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A symbol or string of symbols may comprise a well-formed formula if it is consistent with the formation rules of the language. In a formal system a symbol may be used as a token in formal operations. The set of formal symbols in a formal language is referred to as an alphabet (hence each symbol may be referred to as a "letter") [1] [page needed]
It is often necessary for practical purposes to restrict the symbols in an alphabet so that they are unambiguous when interpreted. For instance, if the two-member alphabet is {00,0}, a string written on paper as "000" is ambiguous because it is unclear if it is a sequence of three "0" symbols, a "00" followed by a "0", or a "0" followed by a "00".
Chemical symbol – Abbreviations used in chemistry; Chinese punctuation – Punctuation used with Chinese characters; Currency symbol – Symbol used to represent a monetary currency's name; Diacritic – Modifier mark added to a letter (accent marks etc.) Hebrew punctuation – Punctuation conventions of the Hebrew language over time
A symbol is an idea, abstraction or concept, tokens of which may be marks or a metalanguage of marks which form a particular pattern. Symbols of a formal language need not be symbols of anything. For instance there are logical constants which do not refer to any idea, but rather serve as a form of punctuation in the language (e.g. parentheses ...
In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules called a formal grammar. The alphabet of a formal language consists of symbols, letters, or tokens that concatenate into strings called words. [1]
Formal language theory, the discipline that studies formal grammars and languages, is a branch of applied mathematics. Its applications are found in theoretical computer science, theoretical linguistics, formal semantics, mathematical logic, and other areas. A formal grammar is a set of rules for rewriting strings, along with a "start symbol ...
The Chomsky hierarchy in the fields of formal language theory, computer science, and linguistics, is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars. A formal grammar describes how to form strings from a language's vocabulary (or alphabet) that are valid according to the language's syntax.
A formal language is an organized set of symbols the essential feature being that it can be precisely defined in terms of just the shapes and locations of those symbols. Such a language can be defined, then, without any reference to any meanings of any of its expressions; it can exist before any interpretation is assigned to it—that is, before it has any meaning.