Panini's Grammar and Computer Science

Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, vol.72, 1993. — pp.79-94Introduction
The enterprise of computer science hast 2 fundamental elements.The first element is to develop techniques that make the elucidation of the computational structure of nature and the mind easier.The second element is the creation of new computing algorithms and machines that have powerful cognitive and computational abilities : this includes development of new techniques of representing and manipulating knowledge,inference and deduction. The tasks of representing and processing knowledge with a somewhat different emphasis has parallels in many ancient disciplines.Thus grammarians have long considered questions of relating facts about the physical world and cognition to linguistic expressions.Likewise logicians have developed formal structures to relate events and draw inferences from them.This is seen best in the work of ancient Indian logicians and grammarians.It has been argued by Ingalls, Staal, Matilal, Briggs, Kak and others that many contemporary developments in formal logic,linguistics,and computer science are a rediscovery of the work of these ancient masters.