Formal Sanskrit Syntax: A Specification for Programming Language

K. Kabi Khanganba, Girish Jha


Abstract
The paper discusses the syntax of the primary statements of the Sanskritam, a programming language specification based on natural Sanskrit under a doctoral thesis. By a statement, we mean a syntactic unit regardless of its computational operations of variable declarations, program executions or evaluations of Boolean expressions etc. We have selected six common primary statements of declaration, assignment, inline initialization, if-then-else, for loop and while loop. The specification partly overlaps the ideas of natural language programming, Controlled Natural Language (Kunh, 2013), and Natural Language subset. The practice and application of structured natural language set in a discourse are deeply rooted in the theoretical text tradition of Sanskrit, like the sūtra-based disciplines and Navya-Nyāya (NN) formal language, etc. The effort is a kind of continuation and application of such traditions and their techniques in the modern field of Sanskrit NLP.
Anthology ID:
2020.aacl-srw.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Boaz Shmueli, Yin Jou Huang
Venue:
AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
72–78
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.aacl-srw.11
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
K. Kabi Khanganba and Girish Jha. 2020. Formal Sanskrit Syntax: A Specification for Programming Language. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop, pages 72–78, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Formal Sanskrit Syntax: A Specification for Programming Language (Khanganba & Jha, AACL 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.aacl-srw.11.pdf