ABSTRACT
We have been studying language, both natural and formal. Formal languages are languages that have completely specified syntax and semantics. What we believe at this point is that programming languages are not all that different from natural languages in their overall concepts. We should expect that programming languages have the same parts (Figure 7.2): although syntax deals with the overall appearance of the language, the meaning of the words is the purview of semantics; informally semantics has taken on the meaning of “meaning of a phrase or sentence.” Regardless, there must be a lexicon and a vocabulary. The lexicon is the entire set of words, whereas the vocabulary is words and definitions. We also have studied semantics in terms of its relationship to the deep structure of a statement.
