Scheme - Re: Saskrit as computer programming language?

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Re: Saskrit as computer programming language?

Great Parayan

2004-06-07, 8:59 am

Crossposting for better analysis and responses...

newsgroup_reader@yahoo.com (Prudence) wrote in message news:<461a8fe9.0406040036.e9b803c@posting.google.com>...
> I have heard this now many times, that Sanskrit is the most ideal for
> a programming language, it being a very strctuctured language.
>
> I could never understand the logic behind this. Every programming
> language has its own structure and syntax, it does not follow the
> structure of the language it is typed in. And thinking about it, is C
> written in English? I don't think. Perl, may be. OTOH, I think coding
> in Sanskirt will will only get you a lot of typos.
>
> Say printf() is mudrA() or is it mudra(). I am sure I am only seeing
> specifics and am missing the real picture.
>
> Can someone explain the whole concept to this novice?

CBFalconer

2004-06-07, 4:02 pm

Great Parayan wrote:
>
> Crossposting for better analysis and responses...

while failing to set follow-ups to a single group, thus causing
the entire matter to be ignored.

--
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

Anton van Straaten

2004-06-07, 4:02 pm

"Great Parayan" <parayan@blackplanet.com> wrote:

> Crossposting for better analysis and responses...
>
>
> newsgroup_reader@yahoo.com (Prudence) wrote in message
news:<461a8fe9.0406040036.e9b803c@posting.google.com>...[color=darkred]

The idea of Sanskrit as programming language seems to stem from NASA
researcher Rick Briggs' 1985 paper, "Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit
and Artificial Intelligence," AI Magazine Vol 6, #1, 1985.

Briggs proposed Sanskrit as a good language for AI-style knowledge
representation, i.e. for machine representation of knowledge expressed in a
structured form, based on natural language. Sanskrit is apparently
well-suited to this application, partly because of its systematized grammar,
and its relative lack of ambiguity. Briggs pointed out correspondences
between KR structures used in AI, and equivalent structures in Sanskrit. At
least a couple of conferences arose as a result of this paper.

However, it's a big leap to say that Sanskrit is ideal for a programming
language (perhaps depending on your definition of programming language).
No-one seems to have proposed Sanskrit-as-programming-language as seriously
as Briggs proposed Sanskrit-as-KR-language.

There's a recent post at http://www.a42.com/node/view/173 entitled "Sanskrit
as an Object-Oriented Language", which quotes a GoodNewsIndia.com article
that describes parallels between OO class structures and the structure of
Sanskrit. However, it's not actually proposing Sanskrit as a programming
language. There are numerous other articles which suggest, for example,
Sanskrit as "a possible computer language"[1] or "the potential uses of
Sanskrit as a machine language"[2], but these all seem to be references to
Briggs' work.

Anton

[1] http://www.rediff.com/search/2003/jul/24sanskrit.htm
[2] http://www.amritapuri.org/education...t/artintell.htm

edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges

2004-06-07, 4:02 pm

In article <sd0xc.1769$Y3.152@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net>,
"Anton van Straaten" <antonvs@acm.org> wrote:

> "Great Parayan" <parayan@blackplanet.com> wrote:
>

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, alt.sci.physics.new-theories,
comp.lang.scheme, talk.bizarre, comp.programming

what is it about injuns and talk-bizarre?
wanna get chased off again?
[color=darkred]
> Briggs proposed Sanskrit as a good language for AI-style knowledge
> representation, i.e. for machine representation of knowledge expressed in a
> structured form, based on natural language. Sanskrit is apparently
> well-suited to this application, partly because of its systematized grammar,
> and its relative lack of ambiguity. Briggs pointed out correspondences
> between KR structures used in AI, and equivalent structures in Sanskrit. At
> least a couple of conferences arose as a result of this paper.

ambiguity and complexity are not errors in natural languages but features
allowing commonly expressed concepts to be expressed qucikly and redundantly
whilst also allowing fallback parsing to less commonly expressed concpets

it also helps that the human brain doesnt disappear in a poof of logic
when faced with an inconsistency in its productions

if sanskrit inherently less ambiguous and complex than any other natural language
odds on favorite is that it aint a natural language

was sanskrit ever used a native language
learned through normal childhood language acquistion
and used from childhood through death for all productions in life
and than passed on to the next generation
through normal childhood language acquistion
without formal instruction
and thus acquiring phonetic and syntactic drift with time
along new word formation and semantic drift of existing stems?

if not than its not a natural language

if its not a natural language then the weak church-turing thesis kicks in
and it can be assumed that sanksrit is a type 0 language
and mechanically translatable iinto any other type 0 language
like fortran or prolog or lisp or irc-speak

now go away

John Savard

2004-06-07, 4:02 pm

On Mon, 07 Jun 2004 09:22:19 -0700, edens morgan mair fheal greykitten
tomys des anges <mair_fheal@yahoo.com> wrote, in part:

>was sanskrit ever used a native language
>learned through normal childhood language acquistion
>and used from childhood through death for all productions in life
>and than passed on to the next generation
>through normal childhood language acquistion
>without formal instruction
>and thus acquiring phonetic and syntactic drift with time
>along new word formation and semantic drift of existing stems?

Yes.

Just as Latin was.

Today, the descendants of those who spoke Latin speak Italian... and
the descendants of those who spoke Sanskrit speak Hindustani.

John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html

Anton van Straaten

2004-06-07, 8:57 pm

"edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges" <mair_fheal@yahoo.com>
wrote:

> if sanskrit inherently less ambiguous and complex than any other
> natural language odds on favorite is that it aint a natural language

"Less complex" was not claimed. Sanskrit is certainly a natural language.
However, one of the things which makes it unique is that around 600 BCE, the
grammarian Panini completed a thorough systematization of the grammar of
Sanskrit:

"Panini's grammar consists of nearly 4,000 rules divided into eight
chapters. It provides a collection of 2,000 roots. Being composed with the
maximum conceivable brevity, this grammar describes the entire Sanskrit
language in all the details of its structure, with a unity which has never
been equalled elsewhere. It is at once the shortest and fullest grammar in
the world." [1]

An interesting point about Panini's grammar is that it "is notably
descriptive; it does not attempt to tell people how they should speak and
write; Panini was only concerned with what people actually did say and
write." [2] This underscores the point about Sanskrit as a natural
language.

However, Panini's rules were a great influence on the subsequent use of
Sanskrit, which remained a much more stable language because of the rules.
George G. Joseph discusses this in his book, "The Crest of the Peacock: The
Non-European Roots of Mathematics":

"[Sanskrit's] potential for scientific use was greatly enhanced as a
result of the thorough systemisation of its grammar by Panini. ... On the
basis of just under 4000 sutras [rules expressed as aphorisms], he built
virtually the whole structure of the Sanskrit language, whose general
'shape' hardly changed for the next two thousand years." -- as quoted in
[3].

In order to create the grammar, Panini "invented a notation which is
equivalent in its power to that of Backus [BNF], and has many similar
properties: given the use to which the notation was put, it is possible to
identify structures equivalent to the Backus '|' and to the use of the
meta-brackets '<' and '>' enclosing suggestive names. Panini avoided the
necessity for the character '::=' by writing the meta-result on the right
rather than the left." [4]

"Panini uses metarules, transformations, and recursion in such
sophistication that his grammar has the computing power equivalent to a
Turing machine. In this sense Panini may be considered the father of
computing machines." [2]

Joseph argued that "An indirect consequence of Panini's efforts to increase
the linguistic facility of Sanskrit soon became apparent in the character of
scientific and mathematical literature," i.e. that the flourishing of Indian
mathematics may have been a direct consequence of the systematization of the
grammar of Sanskrit, and of the formal tools which were developed in order
to do this.

So, it turns out that Sanskrit is on-topic in more of the crossposted groups
than might at first be imagined. I'll close with linguist Frits Staal:

"We can now assert, with the power of hindsight, that Indian linguists in
the fifth century B.C. knew and understood more than Western linguists in
the nineteenth century A.D. Can one not extend this conclusion and claim
that it is probable that Indian linguists are still ahead of their Western
colleagues and may continue to be so in the next century? Quite possible;
all we can say is that it is difficult to detect something that we have not
already discovered ourselves." (as quoted in [5])

Anton

[1] http://evans-experientialism.freewe...m/panininix.htm
[2] http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Panini
[3] http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~hi...ans/Panini.html
[4] http://www.infinityfoundation.com/m...ao-t_syntax.htm
[5] Panini's Grammar and Computer Science,
http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/bhate.pdf

edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges

2004-06-07, 8:57 pm

> "Less complex" was not claimed. Sanskrit is certainly a natural language.
> However, one of the things which makes it unique is that around 600 BCE, the
> grammarian Panini completed a thorough systematization of the grammar of
> Sanskrit:

youre still ignoring equivalence issues

if sanskrit is to be regarded as natural language
the linguistics assumption is that the refutation of whorf-sapir
such that all natural languages are equally complex
and can express the same concepts
so that if you can completely describe one with a type 0 grammar
than you can describe all natural languages with a type 0 grammar

and the only issue is devising the actual mechanical translation
from language to language
so that if sanskrit is a good kr language so too is basque or mandarin or english

if you claim sanskrit is inherently different
less complex or ambiguous
you then run into weaker forms of church-turing
that would posit sanskrit is no different than say prolog

and the only issue again is devising the mechanical translation

youre like someone claiming that 1966 lisp is superior to 1966 fortran
because fortrean didnt support recursion adn lisp did

in fact any program in one language can be mechanically translated
into the other

there is only proven escape from the chomsky hierarchy
are monte carlo methods
it really wouldnt bother me to discover human brains use monte carlo programs
but from a computer i want consistency and predictablility

now how is any of this any relevant to bizarreness

Anton van Straaten

2004-06-07, 8:57 pm

"edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges" <mair_fheal@yahoo.com>
wrote

> [Anton van Straaten wrote:]
language.[color=darkred]
the[color=darkred]
>
> youre still ignoring equivalence issues
....
> now how is any of this any relevant to bizarreness

You seem to be arguing with someone other than me. Perhaps you're arguing
with Rick Briggs, or perhaps even Panini. Talk.bizarre certainly seems like
a good place for such a discussion.

Anton

Björn Lindström

2004-06-07, 8:57 pm

"Anton van Straaten" <antonvs@acm.org> writes:

> "Panini's grammar consists of nearly 4,000 rules divided into eight
> chapters. It provides a collection of 2,000 roots. Being composed with the
> maximum conceivable brevity, this grammar describes the entire Sanskrit
> language in all the details of its structure, with a unity which has never
> been equalled elsewhere. It is at once the shortest and fullest grammar in
> the world." [1]

That would indicate that he didn't systematised the whole language. A
natural language is a lot more complex than that.

There is no reason to believe that Sanskrit was any simpler than other
natural languages. We just don't know all of it.

Edward G. Nilges

2004-06-08, 3:57 am

parayan@blackplanet.com (Great Parayan) wrote in message news:<8a33bb0.0406070320.40dd78d6@posting.google.com>...

Perhaps the appeal of Sanskrit is that it is a dead and therefore
static language, and in principle and for this reason fully
formalizable.

But by this logic, computer programmers employed by The Vatican would
program in Latin.

I do not know whether Sanskrit is suitable for programming. However, a
rather thoughtless comment long ago in American programming circles
was "I'm not going to maintain this code. It was written in Sanskrit."

The comment managed to express both anti-intellectualism and
ethnocentricity and was paradoxical in that many programmers learned
computer languages in part to join in fact a protected community of
court eunuchs who would be able to exclude others based on this
mastery. Their response to a different form of their own gesture
exposed the ultimate futility of the gesture and indeed the way it
sets man against man.

Needless to say, such comments as "dis code is in Sanskrit" in our
globalized world are no longer Politically Correct. They are also
profoundly offensive given India's strengths in software development.
Yet in the 1970s you'd hear them, ironically, from University of
Chicago types, perhaps trained by the Leo Strauss cabal, now in
control in DC, to think ethnocentrism was somehow urbane.

Such comments were often made about code with "too much" elegance, in
an American-Puritan spirit which (as H. L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson
observed) resists elegance and confuses practicality with ugliness.

But should the noble language of the Bhagavad Gita express the needs
of mere science and trade? The Prince does not concern himself with
these matters.

CBFalconer

2004-06-08, 8:57 am

"Edward G. Nilges" wrote:
>
.... much snipped garbage ...

That troll Eddie has sneaked in here on a.f.c with his
nilgewater. This requires plonking the entire thread. He has
already made life on c.p a living hell.

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer@yahoo.com) (cbfalconer@worldnet.att.net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
<http://cbfalconer.home.att.net> USE worldnet address!

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