"You'll have to take that argument up with Knuth, and not with me, though."
And.... so what? We don't all run to Alan Kay for our definitions of object orientation, we don't all run to John McCarthy for a definition of a lambda calculus-based programming language, and we don't all go running to Dijkstra as the final word in structured programming techniques. No disrespect intended to Knuth any more than I intend disrespect to the three other shining luminaries I name, but if we're still arguing about Literate Programming's original Knuth definition 26 years later that is nothing more and nothing less than a testament to the utter failure of the term.
Note carefully how I said the term has failed. In point of fact I think what has happened is that the core ideas that led to the formation of literate programming has indeed essentially succeeded (if not exactly "won") and does indeed live on in languages with abstractions powerful enough that they don't need an additional mangling step layered on top of them and already have powerful comment conventions, some even machine readable. We've found that we don't need to narrate the entire program, but just some bits, and that a "literate" approach isn't always the best. If we have not adopted every last trapping of Knuth's proscription, it is not because it hasn't been tried, it is because it wasn't perfect, any more than any of the three luminaries I mentioned above managed to give us the Last Word on any of those topics. I'm not particularly all that interested in Knuth's precise definition in my day-to-day life any more than I sit here agonizing over the fact that my primary language's object model is in gross violation of a couple of Alan Kay's ideas about OO. We've refined our ideas about documentation a lot since 1984, in all kinds of ways.
And I think Knuth-style LP has some serious cost/benefit problems in modern times that didn't exist at the time of the original proposal; maybe in 1984 I'd use it, but the costs have at best stayed steady and maybe even crept up a bit (as you are now no longer augmenting code with good reordering capabilities but now supplementing and interacting with their capabilities and adding additional complexity thereby), while the relative benefits have plummeted unless you're still stuck in 1980s era languages with 1980s era design techniques.