Right, I'm saying he didn't really need to solve the literate programming problem if he was really focusing on writing a book on algorithms that was to precede

Right, I'm saying he didn't really need to solve the literate programming problem if he was really focusing on writing a book on algorithms that was to precede his book on compilers. That's alright, the journey is often more important than the destination. He wanted to tell the story of writing TeX in a book in which TeX is written, and it made sense to intercalate the text and the program. There just wasn't a tool that could do anything with it yet.