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In mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of strings of symbols that may be constrained by rules that are specific to it. The alphabet of a formal language is the set of symbols, letters, or tokens from which the strings of the language may be formed; frequently it is required to be finite.〔See e.g. .〕 The strings formed from this alphabet are called words, and the words that belong to a particular formal language are sometimes called ''well-formed words'' or ''well-formed formulas''. A formal language is often defined by means of a formal grammar such as a regular grammar or context-free grammar, also called its formation rule. The field of formal language theory studies primarily the purely syntactical aspects of such languages—that is, their internal structural patterns. Formal language theory sprang out of linguistics, as a way of understanding the syntactic regularities of natural languages. In computer science, formal languages are used among others as the basis for defining the grammar of programming languages and formalized versions of subsets of natural languages in which the words of the language represent concepts that are associated with particular meanings or semantics. In computational complexity theory, decision problems are typically defined as formal languages, and complexity classes are defined as the sets of the formal languages that can be parsed by machines with limited computational power. In logic and the foundations of mathematics, formal languages are used to represent the syntax of axiomatic systems, and mathematical formalism is the philosophy that all of mathematics can be reduced to the syntactic manipulation of formal languages in this way. == History == The first formal language is thought be the one used by Gottlob Frege in his ''Begriffsschrift'' (1879), literally meaning "concept writing", and which Frege described as a "formal language of pure thought." Axel Thue's early Semi-Thue system which can be used for rewriting strings was influential on formal grammars. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「formal language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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