Sentence

A sentence is the minimal unit of a language which can have a meaning of its own, in separation from the rest of the message. Very often a message of a language is a sequence or a tree of sentences. Sentences of natural human languages are, with some reservations (e.g. concerning the use of pronouns) sentences in our formal sense. In programming languages sentences are usually called statements; this is in disagreement with the wide use of the term statement as denoting some description of a situation, like a proposition in logic. It is this wiser usage that we catch in our formalization of statement. Statements of programming languages are, in our terminolgy, commands (see).