Hal Abelson Q&A
Peter Seibel interviews Hal Abelson about a variety of topics (via Hacker News):
Actually, when I was at Princeton, Knuth was visiting that year. If you remember, Knuth laid out the whole whatever it is, eight-volume, eight-book series. We found him walking around campus in ’68 and we said, “Hey, we’re undergraduates and we’re doing this project, and we hear that Volume 4 is going to be about compilers. We want to write a symbol table; could we use the manuscript for Volume 4 to do this?” Knuth said something like, “Well, it’s not quite done yet, but we’re really close. I’m sorry it’s not going to be in time for your class project.”
