I apologise for replying to my own message. The programmer that Knuth referred to seems to be "Jim Dunlap of Digitek, who made some of the best early compilers

I apologise for replying to my own message. The programmer that Knuth referred to seems to be "Jim Dunlap of Digitek, who made some of the best early compilers". Early editions of TAOCP referecce James R Dunlap and "Jim invented (at least refined and proved economically viable) a programming paradigm for compiler writing: POPs, Program Operations. Jim designed a computer on paper, an instruction was a POP, e.g., RCA, Require Character and Advance; it was "easy" to write compilers on this paper computer that would eventually be emulated on the customer's hardware. The principal features of this paper computer: LIFO variable length tables, recursion, a stack, translation to, and manipulation of Polish encryption of the program being compiled, character-scanning and code-generation POPs." http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/digitek/digitek_history.txt http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/digitek/digitek_history.txt