Is there a reason for which Donald Knuth choose procedural programming instead of functional programming? [closed]

Question

Donald Knuth's Art of Computer Programming Series uses his own procedural assembly languaged called MIX. Now, the question becomes: should Knuth have used a functional language to describe his algorihtms? Should TeX have been written in a functional language?

Computers have a procedural architecture. Do the roots of computation imply anything about the best branches?

The original AoCP was written in MIX. The updated AoCP used MMIX which was based on more modern architectures.

However, the fundamental point still holds. Knuth went from one procedural architecture to another... with apparently no need for functional programming.

Kryska

Only Donald knows for sure. Perhaps because functional wasn't such a rage when AoCP came out and a rework of that scale was a huge effort with little benefit. Especially since it would have to be changed back when the fad passed :-) – Deliver

Thats Donald Knuth's Art of Computer Programming ;-) – Biconvex

See "What kind of questions should I not ask here?" items 2,3,4,5 in stackoverflow.com/faq – Kentigerma

Knuth explains this in the book - he sticks to Assembly to be as close to the machine as possible, to illustrate every little thing the machine is doing when it calculates, to assess as accurately as possible the efficiency of an algorithm, etc. This isn't about one paradigm vs another, it's just about being close to the machine – Bathometer