[jmbwell]

Still throws me that “order” here means something like “instruction” as in “that’s an order, lieutenant!” and “code” means something like “set,” as in “legal code” or “code of conduct.”

“Program” however is already used here by Knuth in more of the contemporary sense, though I gather in the time of ENIAC and EDVAC, a “program” was more narrowly the sequence of operations that implemented an order/instruction.

What I love most about all this, though, is how much of the machine you can see in the algorithm and the programming. You can almost visualize the vacuum tubes turning on and off in response to these instructions, which themselves would have been electrical pulses arranged into patterns according to the positions of a bunch of Bakelite switches. Just amazing.

[bitshiftfaced]

Back in the 90s, I read "Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess," which he didn't write. It was published in the 60s. I can recall finding it strange how the author goes through the effort to explain what a program was within the context of his book, as though it didn't normally mean what I already understood it to mean.