Sanskrit and Computational Linguistics

The importance of ashtādhyaȳı is three fold. The first one, as is well known, as an almost exhaustive grammar for any natural language with meticulous details yet small enough to memorize. Though ashtādhyāȳı is written to describe the then prevalent Sanskrit language, it provides a grammatical framework which is general enough to analyse other languages as well. This makes the study of ashtādhyāȳı from the point of view of concepts it uses for language analysis important. The third aspect of ashtādhyāȳı is its organization. The set of less than 4000 sūtras is similar to any computer program with one major difference the program being written for a human being and not for a machine thereby allowing some non-formal or semi-formal sūtras which require a human being to interpret and implement them. Nevertheless, we believe that the study of ashtādhyāȳı from programming point of view may lead to a new programming paradigm because of its rich structure. Possibly these are the reasons, why Gerard Huet feels that Panini should be called as the father of informatics.