双语畅销书《艾伦图灵传》第8章:水银延时线(15)
In his 1947 talk he would elaborate on this briefest of all possible comments.
The point was that the universality of the machine made it possible to encode numbers in any way one wished within the machine—in binary form, if that happened to suit the technology.
其中最重要的一点就是，该机器的通用性，使得数字可以在其内部编码成任何需要的形式——当然也包括二进制，如果技术上需要的话。It would be inappropriate to employ binary numbers in a cash register, because it would be more trouble than it was worth to make the conversions for input and output.
收银机不适合二进制，因为对输入和输出进行转换的过程，导致的代价远远大于好处。
On the universal ACE, however, no such conversion was required –
然而对于通用的ACE来说，这种转换过程是不需要的——This last statement sounds quite paradoxical, but it is a simple consequence of the fact that these machines can be made to do any rule of thumb process by remembering suitable instructions.
这个说法听起来有些矛盾，但却是一个很简单的事实，因为该机器可以通过调用指令来执行任何程序。For example in the case of the ACE the provision of the converter involves no more than adding two extra delay lines to the memory. This situation is very typical of what happens with the ACE.
举个例子来说，要在ACE上实现前面所说的转换，只需要增加两条延迟线作为存储，这就是ACE的工作方式。There are many fussy little details which have to be taken care of, and which according to normal engineering practice would require special circuits.
当然这里面还有一些工程细节需要考虑，以及一些特殊的电路。We are able to deal with these points without modification of the machine itself, by pure paperwork, eventually resulting in feeding in appropriate instructions.
我们可以在不改变机器本身的基础上，通过单纯的纸上工作，将相应的指令输入进去。
