> Formal languages are concerned predominantly with syntax. No. I'm using a broader notion of a formal language. Algebra, for example, is a formal language. On

> Formal languages are concerned predominantly with syntax. No. I'm using a broader notion of a formal language. Algebra, for example, is a formal language. One of the ways of defining a formal language is: "anything that can be strictly defined as a term rewriting system", and all the programming languages are fitting. > Most programming languages do not have complete formal semantics grounded in logic. They always do, otherwise their execution won't be deterministic. A programming language implementation + semantics of the hardware and runtime library = semantics of a formal language. > They're thinking about aesthetics, engineering constraints, user experience, timelines, procedures, libraries, version control, type systems, etc. This is exactly how problems are solved in mathematics too.