[gralx]

Yeah, TAOCP's casual style puts me off too. Side by side with high watermarks in technical writing like The C Programming Language, Specifying Systems, or Loney's Elements of Coordinate Geometry its shortcomings are pretty obvious. But that's an opportunity for a clever editor to make an actual reference manual out of TAOCP sometime in the future.

Knuth's a good, engaging writer, but TAOCP's content and typography are definitely better thought out than the prose.

EDIT: Just remembered a BBC interview with a philosophy professor about Kant. Apparently Kant is criticized for being really verbose. The professor's retort was he sensed Kant had so much to say and so little time to say it that he didn't edit very carefully, giving it a similar kind of bloated, meandering quality. Even so, Kant is held up as one of the GOATs, because in the end it's the content that counts.