Panini's Grammar

While reading the chapter on "A Simple One-Pass Compiler" in the Book "Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools", I came across the following sentence mentioned in the bibliography section.

Context-free grammar In formal language theory, a context-free grammar (CFG) is a formal grammar whose production rules were introduced by Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions and the media. [1956] as part of a natural languages. Their use in specifying the syntax of programming languages arose independently. While working with a draft of Algol 60, John Backus John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was a gentile American computer scientist. He led the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define syntaxes of formal languages. He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?" , "hastily adapted [Emil Post's productions[ to that use" (Wexelblat [1981, p.162]). The resulting notation was a variant of context-free grammar. The scholar Pāṇini Pāṇini (; Sanskrit: पाणिनि, pāṇini [páːɳin̪i]) was a Sanskrit grammarian, logician, philologist, and revered scholar in ancient India during the mid-1st millennium BCE, dated variously by most scholars between the 6th–5th and 4th century BCE. devised an equivalent syntactic notation to specify the rules of Sanskrit grammar between 400 B.C and 200 B.C (Ingerman [1967])

There is a section in the wikipedia on [Panini's influence on Modern Linguistics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini#P.C4.81.E1.B9.87ini_and_modern_linguistics).

Chomsky, during his visit to India and had an humble acknowledgment for generative grammar devised by Panini..*"happy to receive the honour in the land where his subject had its origin. "The first generative grammar in the modern sense was Panini's grammar","*

G Cardona, Panini : a survey of research (Paris, 1976), [quotes](http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Panini.html)

Panini's grammar has been evaluated from various points of view. After all these different evaluations, I think that the grammar merits asserting ... that it is one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence.

There was a debate brought about on Ingerman's suggestion to name Backus–Naur form In computer science, Backus–Naur form (BNF, pronounced ), also known as Backus normal form, is a notation system for defining the syntax of programming languages and other formal languages, developed by John Backus and Peter Naur. It is a metasyntax for context-free grammars, providing a precise way to outline the rules of a language's structure. has Panini-Backus form and author, who has studied both Panini's Asthadhyayi and BNF states that both are quite different.