Terminology

WAN, WWAN, MAN, WLAN, CAN, PAN, 3G, 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, RF

From wikipedia: In telecommunications, a communications protocol is a system of rules that allow two or more entities of a communications system to communicate between them to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. These are the rules or standard that defines the syntax, semantics and synchronization of communication and possible error recovery methods. Protocols may be implemented by hardware, software, or a combination of both.

In exchanging data between machines, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, some [[data] communications] protocol is required but also other aspects must be considered by engineers (how format data, what programming language to use for implementing protocol and packaging/unpackacking data, et c.).

The table below introduces areas to consider, grouped by types of formal languages.

Type Example(s) M2M
Markup languages HyperText Markup Language (HTML), EXtensible Markup Language (XML), Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) (Yes)
Style languages Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) (No)
Programming languages JavaScript, PHP, Perl, Python, C, C++, Java, Ruby, R (statistics) (Yes)
Pattern matching Regular expressions (Yes)
Protocols HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) Yes
Query languages Structured Query Language (SQL), SPARQL (Yes)
Protocol may refer to a multitude of topics in (e.g.) society, arts, science, and communications - more...