A language, whether natural (such as English) or artificial (such as Java), is a set
of strings of characters from some alphabet. The strings of a language are called
sentences or statements. The syntax rules of a language specify which strings
of characters from the language’s alphabet are in the language. English, for
example, has a large and complex collection of rules for specifying the syntax of
its sentences. By comparison, even the largest and most complex programming
languages are syntactically very simple.