A lot of the literate programming stuff does really appear to be working through the shortcomings of Pascal. :) I played around with it a while in college; it worked pretty well for writing the report at the same time as the code for projects.

I was not all that impressed reading TeX: the Program, though, because the 1st chapter introduced a bunch of global variables and initialization that were pointless out of context— I thought they really belonged in the situations where they were actually used!