The ascendance of communication technologies such as the internet has accentuated the need to improve access, manipulation and translation of written language. One of the main goals of researchers in the field of computational linguistics is to create programs that put to use knowledge of human language in pursuit of technology that can overcome the many obstacles in the interaction between human and computer. In this endeavor, finding automated techniques to parse the complexities of human grammar is a premier problem tackled by human-interface researchers. The intricacy of human grammar poses problems not only of accuracy, but also of efficiency.

This book investigates programs for automatic analysis and production of written human language. These specialized programs use knowledge about the structure and meaning of human language in the form of grammars. Various techniques are proposed which focus on solutions for practical problems in processing of constraint-logic grammars. The solutions are all based on the automatic adaptation or compilation of a grammar rather than a modification of the processing algorithm used. As such they allow the grammar writer to abstract over details of grammar processing and in many cases enable more efficient processing.

This anthology of essays from Donald Knuth, "the father of computer science," and the inventor of literate programming includes early essays on related topics such as structured programming, as well as The Computer Journal article that launched literate programming itself. Many examples are given, including excerpts from the programs for TeX and METAFONT. The final essay is an example of CWEB, a system for literate programming in C and related languages.

This volume is first in a series of Knuth's collected works.