The Hindu Business Line : Modern computer owes its origin to Panini

Hyderabad, March 27 The ancient Indian grammarian Panini’s treatise ‘Astadhyayi’, or Eight books, hold several clues that modern computer scientists can exploit to enrich language processing.

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.

An ardent admirer of Panini, Prof. Honsell, who is the Rector of the University of Udine, Italy, and Professor of Computer Sciences, 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. While the use of Algebra is conspicuous in Panini and later day works by Indians, in Greece, Geometry is dominant consequent to the great contributions of Euclid.

The Italian Professor who was in Hyderabad recently chairing an Indo-Italian workshop on IT, education and research at the B.M. Birla Science Centre, said India has played a big role in the history of mathematics, science and computers over the centuries.

Prof. Honsell said his University has interest in Indology and one of the most well known Indologist, Prof. Tessitori, who worked in Rajasthan also came from Udine.

Interestingly, Prof. Honsell’s fascination for India is also reflected in the development of a general purpose portal that is expected to give insights into the cultural heritage of the world, especially countries with a long past such as India, Italy, Greece, Egypt, China and so on.

The portal has been named eDwara (door) and is a product of an EU sponsored Indo-Italian research initiative. It provides scope to build a digital platform, where one could contribute to developing a digital library, museums, archives and so on, he explained.

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.

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