https://DevOpsCloud.io -- Cloud Monk Losang Jinpa, Ph.D., MCSE/MCT, GitOps DevOps Engineer

In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of strings whose symbols are taken from a set called "alphabet".

The alphabet of a formal language consists of symbols that concatenate into strings, also called "words". Words that belong to a particular formal language are sometimes called well-formed words. A formal language is often defined by means of a formal grammar such as a regular grammar or context-free grammar.

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 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.

The field of formal language theory studies primarily the purely syntactic 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.