Page "Sanskrit literature" Paragraph 5

In the Vedanga disciplines of grammar and phonetics, no author had greater influence than with his ( ca.

5th century BC ).

In the tradition of Sutra literature exposing the full grammar of Sanskrit in extreme brevity, Panini's brilliance lies in the nature of his work of a prescriptive generative grammar, involving metarules, transformations and recursion.

Being prescriptive for all later grammatical works, such as Patanjali's ,'s grammar effectively fixed the grammar of Classical Sanskrit.

The Backus-Naur Form or BNF grammars used to describe modern programming languages have significant similarities with Panini's grammar rules.