A great scholar indeed. Very rarely we come across such Great Scholars deeply rooted in the traditional Knowledge systems at the same time very much conversant with modern technology.
I have seen his software on Shābdabodha in 1993 (or maybe in 1994), during a conference organised by him. This software would generate the shaabdabodha for a given Sanskrit sentence.
He was very open-minded and of helping nature. When I approached him in 2002-03 informing him about my plan to work on Sanskrit computational linguistics, he immediately provided me with his word generation software and asked his technical staff to provide me all the necessary help so that I could install it on my machine.
Thus under the
contributor's list, of Samsaadhanii, the Academy of Sanskrit Research, Melkote goes at the top.
It is a great loss to the field of Sanskrit Studies.
-- Amba