It's important to remember that for Knuth, the typeset documentation is the “real” program; neither the input you type (the .web or .w file) nor the code genera

It's important to remember that for Knuth, the typeset documentation is the “real” program; neither the input you type (the .web or .w file) nor the code generated (the .pas or .c file) are intended to be looked at much. (You may look at them sometimes, the same way you may sometimes look at the generated assembly of your C program for debugging, but that should be rare.) He writes programs on paper; he programmed the whole of TeX and Metafont by writing them with pen/pencil on notepads for several months, before approaching a computer and typing it all in. He also reads a lot of programs written by others, something most programmers today don't really do. (http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/ http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/) When he wants to understand or remember what some program does, he pulls out the printout, reads it like a book, etc. As a scholar, reading and writing books is his natural activity, so everything is optimized for that. I read a few of Knuth's programs (https://github.com/shreevatsa/knuth-literate-programs/tree/master/programs https://github.com/shreevatsa/knuth-literate-programs/tree/m...) a while ago, the intended way: printed them out and read them while sitting at a table, pen in hand, no computers nearby. The 60s/70s style is quite different — since then a bunch of solutions to the challenges in programming have evolved (abstraction, structured programming, modules with information hiding, OOP, etc), but instead Knuth has evolved his own different solutions, which takes some getting used to. But after a while it was fine and illuminating; you understand there are different ways of doing things, and they can be effective too.