[squibbles]

> There was a brilliant programmer at Digitek who had completely novel and now unknown ideas for software development; he never published anything, but you could read and analyze his source code.

Does anyone know about whom Knuth was referring? Did this have anything to do with the work on the PL/I compiler?

[svat]

Seems to have been Jim Dunlap (James R. Dunlap), who wrote many Fortran compilers. Just posted a comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25955227