There are several orders of magnitude in complexity between tr and TeX, making such a comparison fruitless.

That said, have a gander here: http://brokestream.com/tex.pdf

Not nearly as good as the hardcover, which has a proper table of contents and index.

The key is to imagine 40 years of progress along these lines. I can't imagine our default target would be paper.

The PDF still doesn't help much. The expositionary style of breaking out inner code blocks from their call site harms the ability to understand what's happening. It's nearly impossible to follow in the raw source. Hyperlinks don't improve matters much and the PDF rendering doesn't have rational layout for details like numeric tables.

Try unraveling the numeric code in Metafont:

http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/knuth/dist/mf/mf.web

http://www.tug.org/texlive//devsrc/Master/texmf-dist/doc/gen...

The first implements a programming language and typesetting system, while the second just swaps characters. I'm not sure it's a fair comparison. (Additionally, the TeX source is also meant to be formatted, not read raw.)

The TeX source is not in the form in which it is intended to be read. It's like you showing the current HTML and JavaScript source code of some article and complain that the message is hard to read.

What you showed as the TeX source is at the same time a source representation for this book:

Computers & Typesetting, Volume B: TeX: The Program (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1986), ISBN 0-201-13437-3

and at the same time the "plain" Pascal program can be extracted from that same source representation(1)

That was the idea of Literate Programming that Knuth also tried to demonstrate in his article as he was "framed."

Which other program that is hard to develop (that one took 10 years of the best programmer in the world, supported by his students and assistants) has a nicely printed book form that fits 600 pages and has all the descriptions?

Even more impressive, Knuth intentionally developed his program with the specific idea that its outputs are the same no matter how much the computers change in the future. And he managed to achieve this -- the more ports of his original program are available everywhere and using his sources from eighties produce exactly same pages as then.

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1) "WEB programs are converted to Pascal sources by tangle and to a TeX input file by weave. Of course, tangle and weave are WEB programs as well. So one needs tangle to build tangle---and weave and TeX to read a beautifully typeset WEB program" -- that is, if you don't buy a book which is already typeset and printed.

From my point of view, it is second.

Also, from my point of view, I am MUCH MORE conditioned to read second variant of code.

Third point of mine is that TeX source must be read in PDF form, not in the TeX form. I have the courage to extend that that TeX source code must be manipulated in PDF (read: readable) form, not as the source code per se.

The syntax highlighting helps a lot

> > for (size_t i = 0; i < bytes_read; i++) > buf[i] = xlate[to_uchar (buf[i])];

TIL, tr does not support utf8

From TeX:

> last:=first; {cf.\ Matthew 19\thinspace:\thinspace30}

har har har { eyeroll }