He has more recently begun working in earnest on the fourth volume, which he expects to be 2000 pages and divided into three separate subvolumes. To complete the remaining volumes of the series, Knuth has entered into a retirement of sorts, to work full-time on this single project. Notable byproducts of this work were the WEB and CWEB languages for structured documentation and the accompanying methodology of Literate Programming. Donald Knuth currently lives on the Stanford University Campus with his wife Jill and their two children John and Jennifer. He continues his full-time work on the fourth volume of The Art of Computer Programming.
Compilers are languages that translate between higher level language and binary machine language.
During the early 1960s when Knuth did his pioneering work in this area, the writing of compilers was considered an extremely difficult undertaking, although modern software has since rendered it much easier. Perhaps Knuth's most original contribution to the field of computer science was his work on the analysis of algorithms. An algorithm is the most basic set of instructions written into a program in order to perform a particular task, such as searching or sorting. In collaboration with one of his graduate students at Cal Tech, Knuth developed the Knuth-Bendix algorithm for exploring the consequences of mathematical axioms. The Art of Computer Programming is basically a detailed survey of the practice and science of algorithms.