Metalanguage

What is metalanguage?
From a programming language perspective, a metalanguage is a language that is used to make assertions related to statements in another language known as object language. Metalanguage helps describe the concepts, grammar, and objects associated with a particular programming language.

Metasprache wird häufig in Sprachdesign, Analysatoren, Compilern und Theorembeweisern verwendet. Es wird auch in Finanzsystemen, Bioinformatics und anderen ähnlichen Anwendungen verwendet.
Metalanguage promotes functional programming and is often viewed as impure functional language. Metalanguage is mostly used to describe the grammar or related terminology of programming languages. There are several types of metalanguages such as ordered, nested, and embedded metalanguages. An ordered metalanguage is similar to ordered logic, with each level having a higher level of abstraction.

A nested metalanguage is different from an ordered metalanguage, with each level including the one below. An embedded metalanguage is a language embedded in the object language that occurs both naturally and formally.
Application software often consists of instruction sets in clear and simple programming language. Metalanguage is able to describe both semantic and syntactic properties of a language. With various computer programming languages available, many of these languages have unique sets of rules known as syntax; Metalanguage can help decipher these rules.

BNF (Backus-Naur form) is an example of a metalanguage that is often used to describe the syntax of programming languages. XSL is also considered a metalanguage that allows the file encoding to be defined in the XML standard that needs to be transformed or formatted. Lisp is another popular language that uses its own metalanguage.