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The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

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Re: The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth

#31

Post by jdnier »

jdnier wrote: post #30

From Future Plans... > And after Volumes 1--5 are done, God willing, I plan to publish Volume 6 (the theory of context-free languages) and Volume 7 (Compiler techniques), but only if the things I want to say about those topics are still relevant and still haven't been said. Volumes 1--5 represent the central core of computer programming for sequential machines; the subjects of Volumes 6 and 7 are important but more s…

And about Volume 5...

> Syntactic Algorithms, in preparation.

9. Lexical scanning (includes also string search and data compression)

10. Parsing techniques

Re: The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth

#32

Post by dolmen »

Latest Knuth preprint: "Fillomino Densities", dated 2026-07-01

From a previous preprint titled "Claude’s Cycle", dated 2026-02-28 [2]:

  It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving. I’ll try to tell the story briefly in this note.
[1] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/fillomino-...

[2] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc...

Re: The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth

#33

Post by kps »

wolfi1 wrote: post #27
kps wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a proof that he can at best asymptotically approach volume 7.

but what distraction could it be now? There seems to be nothing to be done for TeX

The way I see it: Volume 7 is compilation. Since many optimization techniques are NP-complete, Knuth will have to take a break from writing TAOCP to settle whether or not P=NP.

Re: The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth

#34

Post by flir »

kps wrote: post #33
wolfi1 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but what distraction could it be now? There seems to be nothing to be done for TeX

The way I see it: Volume 7 is compilation. Since many optimization techniques are NP-complete, Knuth will have to take a break from writing TAOCP to settle whether or not P=NP.

Three months, tops.

Re: The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth

#35

Post by nickpeterson »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #19

I wonder how many of the problems he lists on https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html could be solved/checked with something like Fable at this point.

It feels like something anthropic or OpenAI would pounce on for marketing clout

Re: The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth

#36

Post by jcranmer »

convolvatron wrote: post #25
zerr wrote: post #20

The valuable prose aside, I never liked that code examples were in a pseudo assembly language.

consider the alternatives. it could have been written in PL-1 and rapidly become dated. or it could have been written in a slightly higher level custom language and that would also have to be taught and would be less clear about what was going on under the hood. or a kind of pseudo-code that would also admit ambiguity. or it could have been rewritten in pascal, and then java, and then javascript and then rust. given…

Well, even as-is, it turns out that the kind of assembly language that Knuth originally wrote it in itself had a very short lifespan. MIX assumes a single accumulator register for arithmetic, which hasn't been a common processor architecture since around the 1980s. MMIX is redesigned to be more RISC, but it also uses a dynamic register window concept (which itself I think was only used on Itanium, and we all know how that architecture went down).

And unfortunately, for a lot of modern algorithms, you're going to have dive into SIMD-like algorithms, something MMIX doesn't have. Also, a lot of modern processors have a decent suite of bitwise operations (e.g., count leading/trailing zeros/ones, popcount) that is also missing from MMIX.

The programming languages that are in favor may change from decade to decade, but so to does most of the assembly language techniques.

Re: The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth

#37

Post by mcv »

TheChaplain wrote: post #7

I am not a believer, but pray that whichever $DEITY is watching over Donald Knuth allows him a healthy and long life to reach the achievement of finishing volume 7.

He's a Christian (he's also written about that), but considering the time volume 4 took (and is still taking), I have my doubts he's going to make it.

Re: The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth

#39

Post by compiler-guy »

jcranmer wrote: post #36
convolvatron wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

consider the alternatives. it could have been written in PL-1 and rapidly become dated. or it could have been written in a slightly higher level custom language and that would also have to be taught and would be less clear about what was going on under the hood. or a kind of pseudo-code that would also admit ambiguity. or it could have been rewritten in pascal, and then java, and then javascript and then rust. given…

Well, even as-is, it turns out that the kind of assembly language that Knuth originally wrote it in itself had a very short lifespan. MIX assumes a single accumulator register for arithmetic, which hasn't been a common processor architecture since around the 1980s. MMIX is redesigned to be more RISC, but it also uses a dynamic register window concept (which itself I think was only used on Itanium, and we all know how…

Sparc and Xtensa also have register windows, although each has a slightly different implementation.

They were all the rage for a while, because they make procedure calls fast but turn out to have subtle issues in highly-multithreaded scenarios.

Re: The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth

#40

Post by wkoszek »

ocd wrote: post #13

I'm sure most of it is above my head, but I purchased the entire set in a mispricing for approximately ~$40 some time ago, and I'm really happy to have it in my library.

Many people do, yet when I open it from time to time and read through some sections, it can be a lot of fun
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