Opened the book, thought "no, it can't be". Agonized for days and weeks if I'm making a fool of myself.
Sent the bug report.
First word in first sentence in first paragraph in first chapter was wrong. Got my cheque. ;-)
But the number of parameters is finite, and all parameters have a finite number of possible values.
His errata changed the wording thus:
Zillions of alphabets can be generated by the programs in this book. (https://ftp.rrze.uni-erlangen.de/ctan/systems/knuth/dist/err...)
I was so excited.
I then checked the errata. It was known.
It took another 20 years before I found an actual mistake, regarding the early history of superimposed codes. A very specialized topic where I have one of the few copies of the patent challenge distinguishing between random superimposed codes and arbitrarily selected superimposed codes.
I have a check.
For example, in Volume 4A there's a simple technique for comparing two pointers in bit-reversed form. This technique was patented by Hewlett-Packard as a method of randomizing search trees (treaps):
https://bugfix-66.com/fdb8bb4fa84cf810aa25ff40c88a13c1874410...
From Volume 3, here is by far the fastest method of sorting integers (Singleton's method), an algorithm I have used professionally several times (e.g., for beam search in a speech decoder):
https://bugfix-66.com/834f0677c85b23c0bf1047d3654ab7c27ff054...
Knuth's books are just packed with gems like that.
The meticulous high quality of the books is also remarkable. However, if you look very carefully you can find rare mistakes. I received payment from Knuth and have an account at his bank:
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html
Getting your name on the above list was once a Hacker rite of passage.