#Panini

“Twenty-three centuries before computer science existed, a man from a village on the Indus produced what computer scientists instantly recognize as one of their own — a complete, compressed, rule-based specification of a natural language — and the recognition is on record: in 1967 an American engineer formally proposed renaming the notation used to define programming languages after him.”

“A living language can be captured in a finite machine. Pāṇini compressed the whole of Sanskrit — every sound-change, every word-form, every derivation — into just under four thousand interlocking rules that generate the language the way axioms generate a geometry.”