In this section discusses some basic strictures that a program might have. It's quite interesting to see the perspective of programmers from 30-40 years ago. For example in Section 1.4.3.1 on page 202, Knuth says talks about how it is a waste of programmer time to simulate existing machines on other machines. His argument, which seems reasonable, is that the applications will run slower and the time it takes to just reprogram the original program will be better spent as mistakes might be caught. This all seems rather ironic in light of this:
http://xkcd.com/676/.
