Maybe you get a better understanding if you remember the automata generating these languages. Regular languages are generated by regular automata. They have only have a finit knowledge of the past (their compute memory has limits) so everytime you have a language with suffixes depending on prefixes (palindrome language) this can not be done with … Read more
An important detail here is that grammars do not accept strings; they generate strings. Grammars are descriptions of languages that provide a means for generating all possible strings contained in the language. In order to tell if a particular string is contained in the language, you would use a recognizer, some sort of automaton that … Read more
Below is my (current) favorite demonstration of why parsing C++ is (probably) Turing-complete, since it shows a program which is syntactically correct if and only if a given integer is prime. So I assert that C++ is neither context-free nor context-sensitive. If you allow arbitrary symbol sequences on both sides of any production, you produce … Read more