From: jayasim@platypus.cis.ohio-state.edu (D Jayasimha)
Subject: Re: Sanskrit and the Unity of India
Organization: The Ohio State University Dept. of Computer and Info. Science
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 22:36:42 GMT

In article <1992Sep8.225035.26471@colorado.edu> manu@tigger.cs.Colorado.EDU (K. S. Manu) writes:
>In article <BuA34C.MzJ@acsu.buffalo.edu> C999S2W4@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu writes:
>>
>>   Research has proved that Sanskrit is the best language for use in
>>Computers. This will give a great boost to the Indian Contribution in the
>>field of Computer Programming.
>
>Can you give the source of this information? I don't believe it can be true.
>Sanskrit, I'm told, is rather complex language with many peculiarities,
>the last thing you'd want in a Computer Language. Venmani Namboothiri was
>known for writing "slokam"s with more than one meaning which implies that
>the language is ambiguous. (He wrote in either Sanskrit or Manipravalam, a
>language very similar to Sanskrit) I think he used the idea of breaking
>up compount words differently to get different meanings.
>
>Njan

The tall claim by the poster from Buffalo is probably based on the article,
"Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and AI" by Rick Briggs of the NASA
Ames Research Center which appeared in the Spring 1985 issue of AI Magazine.
Even in that article, it is not claimed that Sanskrit could be a replacement
for computer languages a la Pascal, C, etc.  It is only claimed that unlike
most natural languages, Sanskrit can admit of unambiguous representation for 
mechanical processing.  One can argue on both sides of the issue even as
far as the last statement is concerned.

As Njan points out, sentences in Sanskrit can be ambiguous.  The source of
ambiguity is both syntactic and semantic.  In an attempt to succinctly
represent composite words, Sanskrit allows words to be joined using
specific rules (Rules of Sandhi)- the joining is based on syntax alone.
Composite meanings/descriptions can be encoded using the rules of Samaasa-
for example, the statement "the person who has an unsuccessful date with 
a vegetarian and who leafs through Debonair" could have a succinct 
representation.  The problem arises when such compound words are disjoined
to interpret them.  Many a time, they can be disjoined in more than one
way.  Our own Mani Varadarajan had an interesting interpretation of the
Gita verse 9:32 based on this non-uniqueness.  There is also the problem
of "grammatical peculiarities" which make the application of syntactic
rules context sensitive (the peculiarity "raajan sakhibhyaha touch" comes
to mind particularly because we as high school students had a raunchy
explantion of this rule when part of it is interpreted in English :-)).

On the other hand, most other rules of Sanskrit grammar are laid out in a 
methodical fashion.  The pioneering work on this was done by Paanini more 
than two thousand years back.  The Backus-Naur form of expressing the 
syntax of computer languages bears some resemblance to the manner of the
Panini rules so much so somebody had suggested that BNF should be called PBNF.

Perhaps, a modified form of Sanskrit which does not admit of grammatical
peculiarities and the Sandhi/Samaasa formations could be used as a language
for knowledge representation.
language. 

jayasimha (jayasim@cis.ohio-state.edu)






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