An Article From The Hindu Businessline
In the 6th century B.C. Panini formalised the phonetics of Sanskrit through his scientific grammar. “Huge amount of ideas are buried in the Astadhyayi. They can be used for formal language processing in computer science,” says Prof. Furio Honsell of Italy: A Professor of Computer Sciences.
An ardent admirer of Panini, Prof. Honsell, said modern day ‘Compilers’, come closest to the tools that the great Indian grammarian used to give form and content to language, especially Sanskrit.
Compilers are special programmes that help process statements written in a particular programming language and turn them into machine language or “code” that a computer’s processor understands.
Prof. Honsell, who is researching into the history of computers, said, “I first encountered the seminal work of Panini about nine years ago and was very impressed. He seems to have anticipated a lot of techniques that are being developed in modern computer language processing.”
Panini’s syntax has been found suitable for computer codes and most world languages adhere to his syntax.
Excited about the work, Prof. Honsell has authored An informative investigation into Panini’s Astadhyayi, and says that the focus on grammar is consistent throughout the long history of India. The use of Algebra is conspicuous in Panini’s work and later day works by Indians.
Panini could be appropriately considered as the forerunner of the modern formal language theory used to specify computer languages. It was only towards the end of 1950’s that the contributions of John Backus of IBM in developing the first compiler gave impetus to the language processing.
It is indeed remarkable that concepts which are considered fundamental to modern day’s theoretical computer science should have their origin with an Indian genius more than 2,500 years back.
( Disclaimer : All images featured in this Blog-post, are the property of their respective owners. Our deepest sense of gratitude to all of them for making this gigantic project a reality. If you see your picture anywhere in this Blog and don't want it here, send us a message with the details and the link to the picture, and we will remove it right away. But at the outset, I just want to let my dearest readers know, that the noble purpose of this Blog, is to promote 'The Glorious Cultural Heritage of India' worldwide, to every nook & corner of the planet, and I would immensely love to see every single one of us, of Indian origin, passionately participating in this Mega-Project. I am right now in the process of adding the web-links to the sources of the innumerable images in this Blog. Till the work reaches completion, I would request the readers to use 'Google Image Search' to trace the source / multiple sources of these images on the web. The rich text contents througout this blog are based on well-researched aggregated and curated content from innumerable sources. But mostly and most importantly, these contents are based on my own personal experience of untiringly exploring the glorious cultural heritage India, and the ageless timeless ethnic arts, crafts, textiles, temples etc of the whole of India, during my stay across the length and breadth of this vast expansive Indian subcontinent for more than 5 decades of my long adventurous life. I have expressed my deepest gratitude to all the text sources on the 'World-Wide-Web', that have hugely contributed and added to my existing database of knowledge on this subject, by inserting appropriate hyperlinks throughout this blog, to connect my ardent readers from across the globe, to these rich sources of information on India's heritage. So Long, Mala Chandrashekhar )
0 Comments