Oops, you're right - I joined them into one person. With that said, I didn't really mean to suggest the exercise was set up to snipe at Knuth, just that the cri

Oops, you're right - I joined them into one person. With that said, I didn't really mean to suggest the exercise was set up to snipe at Knuth, just that the criticism (McIlroy's) seems off the mark. I mean, one presumes that when Knuth wants to count the words in a text file he uses shell scripts, right? It would follow that he's only applying Literate Programming to a toy problem for purposes of illustration. As such, saying he's wrong to use LP for this task seems to miss the point (and doesn't say much about LP).