I wouldn't want to be the publisher betting on a 73 year old with a history of missing deadlines hitting one in nine years time.
And then, from the site:
---
After Volume 5 has been completed, I will revise Volumes 1--3 again to bring them up to date. In particular, the new material for those volumes that has been issued in beta-test fascicles will be incorporated at that time.
Then I will publish a ``reader's digest'' edition of Volumes 1--5, condensing the most important material into a single book.
And after Volumes 1--5 are done, God willing, I plan to publish Volume 6 (the theory of context-free languages) and Volume 7 (Compiler techniques), but only if the things I want to say about those topics are still relevant and still haven't been said. Volumes 1--5 represent the central core of computer programming for sequential machines; the subjects of Volumes 6 and 7 are important but more specialized.
---
Which would all be wonderful, but seems possibly overoptimistic. Sadly.
The current errata for volume 4A has 2 items: 1) he left off the left quotation mark around an equation in one place, 2) one entry in the index should be changed.
So people shouldn’t worry too much yet about the book being full of errors. :)
