Aristotle ( ca 350 BC ) was one of the first in recorded history to make a formal distinction between ordinary law and constitutional law, establishing ideas of constitution and constitutionalism, and attempting to classify different forms of constitutional government.

In addition to the formal constitutional role, the Governor-General has a ceremonial role, though the extent and nature of that role has depended on the expectations of the time, the individual in office at the time, the wishes of the incumbent government, and the individual's reputation in the wider community.

In a republic, the head of state is nowadays usually styled President, and usually their permanent constitutions provide for election, but many have or had other titles and even specific constitutional positions ( see below ), and some have used simply ' head of state ' as their only formal title.

New Zealand has no formal codified constitution ; the constitutional framework consists of a mixture of various documents ( including certain acts of the United Kingdom and New Zealand Parliaments ), the Treaty of Waitangi and constitutional conventions.

our constitutional practices do not derive their validity and sanction from any Bill which has received the formal assent of the King, Lords and Commons.

Despite its growing dominance in the constitutional hierarchy, the Premiership was given little formal recognition ; the legal fiction was maintained that the Sovereign still governed directly.

In 2003, the Nevis Island Administration again proposed secession and initiated formal constitutional procedures to hold a referendum on the issue, which was held in early 2004.

The President has no formal role in the constitutional amendment process.

Some older constitutions ( for example, Australia's 1900 text, and Belgium's 1830 text ) do not mention the office of Prime minister at all, the office becoming a de facto reality without formal constitutional status.

The concept of fiscal federalism is not to be associated with fiscal decentralization in officially declared federations only ; it is applicable even to non-federal states ( having no formal federal constitutional arrangement ) in the sense that they encompass different levels of government which have defacto decision making authority ( Sharma, 2005a: 44 ).

In the Dutch constitutional system there is not only formal law ; also other general governmental regulations are recognised, binding the citizen ; the overarching concept is called " material law ".

Therefore no constitutional review of formal laws is possible ; the Netherlands lack a Constitutional Court.

Since then the château has continued to welcome the parlement when called upon to sit in a congressional sitting, jointly with the upper house in order to enact constitutional changes or, as happened most recently in June 2009, to listen to a formal declaration by the president.

By constitutional convention, the Prime Minister holds formal power to advise the Sovereign.

As for Taiwan independence supporters, some have objections regarding the formal constitutional commitment to a particular set of political principles.

It was later passed into formal law by the Long Parliament in 1641 and became one of the three constitutional documents of English civil liberties, along with the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689.

With formal adoption ( inauguration ) of the Amendment IX to the Constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the anthem Hey, Slavs gained constitutional sanction on November 25, 1988.

Unlike the historic monarchies of Europe, the modern British monarchy is a purely statutory institution in which only the monarch him or herself has a formal constitutional role.

Some political scientists believe that reserve powers are a good thing in that they allow for a government to handle an unforeseen crisis and that the use of convention to limit the use of reserve powers allows for more gradual and subtle constitutional evolution than is possible through formal amendment of a written constitution.

As a society becomes more democratic, conventions and limitations on the power of the head of state become increasingly established and constitutional evolution occurs by establishing conventions rather than by formal amendment of the constitution.

* The 2008 – 2009 Canadian parliamentary dispute, in which Liberal, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois Members of Parliament attempted to have a vote of non-confidence against the Conservative government and replace it with a coalition government, was unprecedented in the Canadian constitutional system, as formal party based co-operation was rare.

In some states, notably those Commonwealth of Nations states that follow the Westminster system and whose political systems derive from British constitutional law, most government functions are guided by constitutional convention rather than by a formal written constitution.

This may be a formal hierarchy, or they may be vague, overlapping terms, or a combination of both.

Later still, abstraction was manifest in more purely formal terms, such as color, freedom from objective context, and a reduction of form to basic geometric designs.

Using terms from formal language theory, the precise mathematical definition of this concept is as follows: Let S and T be two finite sets, called the source and target alphabets, respectively.

* Semantics encoding of formal language A in formal language B is a method of representing all terms ( e. g. programs or descriptions ) of language A using language B.

In every day terms, the imam for Sunni Muslims is the one who leads Islamic formal ( Fard ) prayers, even in locations besides the mosque, whenever prayers are done in a group of two or more with one person leading ( imam ) and the others follow by copying his ritual actions of worship.

In general terms, a calculus is a formal system that consists of a set of syntactic expressions ( well-formed formulæ or wffs ), a distinguished subset of these expressions ( axioms ), plus a set of formal rules that define a specific binary relation, intended to be interpreted as logical equivalence, on the space of expressions.

Tegmark writes that " abstract mathematics is so general that any Theory Of Everything ( TOE ) that is definable in purely formal terms ( independent of vague human terminology ) is also a mathematical structure.

The terms Neogene System ( formal ) and upper Tertiary System ( informal ) describe the rocks deposited during the Neogene Period.

Like other theories, the theory of probability is a representation of probabilistic concepts in formal terms — that is, in terms that can be considered separately from their meaning.

These formal terms are manipulated by the rules of mathematics and logic, and any results are interpreted or translated back into the problem domain.

where n is a natural number, the coefficients are elements of R, and X is a formal symbol, whose powers X < sup > i </ sup > are just placeholders for the corresponding coefficients a < sub > i </ sub >, so that the given formal expression is just a way to encode the sequence, where there is an n such that a < sub > i </ sub > = 0 for all i > n. Two polynomials sharing the same value of n are considered equal if and only if the sequences of their coefficients are equal ; furthermore any polynomial is equal to any polynomial with greater value of n obtained from it by adding terms in front whose coefficient is zero.

Thus each polynomial is actually equal to the sum of the terms used in its formal expression, if such a term a < sub > i </ sub > X < sup > i </ sup > is interpreted as a polynomial that has zero coefficients at all powers of X other than X < sup > i </ sup >.

Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is declarative: the program logic is expressed in terms of relations, represented as facts and rules.

The terms ' Paleogene System ' ( formal ) and ' lower Tertiary System ' ( informal ) are applied to the rocks deposited during the ' Paleogene Period '.

When the terms formal parameter and actual parameter are used, they generally correspond with the definitions used in computer science.

In less formal terms, a polymath ( or polymathic person ) may simply be someone who is very knowledgeable.

The relational model was the first database model to be described in formal mathematical terms.

Numerous slang terms pass into informal mainstream speech, and sometimes into formal speech, though this may involve a change in meaning or usage.

A more formal definition of a finite sequence with terms in a set S is a function from

In formal terms, the worldsheet in these theories is a non-orientable surface.

The collection, structuring and recovery of linked data are enabled by technologies that provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.