Hm what unused better software did Djikstra write?
Maybe Knuth could have used Fortran and not Pascal, but that doesn’t solve the literate programming problem ... he would still want something like WEB.
Seems like Fortran is more maintained today than Pascal, but Knuth couldn’t have known that. The community yak shave to translate the code arose out of other forces in the industry.
Pascal was a huge force in the computing world for quite awhile - Turbo Pascal on the IBM PC was by far and away perhaps the most performant programming environment available.
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.
Maybe Knuth could have used Fortran and not Pascal, but that doesn’t solve the literate programming problem ... he would still want something like WEB.
Seems like Fortran is more maintained today than Pascal, but Knuth couldn’t have known that. The community yak shave to translate the code arose out of other forces in the industry.