雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第8章:水銀延時線(25)
Perhaps he drew the imagery of burying and unburying from the silver bar story. This was an entirely new idea.
Von Neumann had thought only in terms of working through a sequence of instructions.
而馮·諾伊曼此時只想到了一系列線性的指令表。The concept of a hierarchy of tables brought in further applications of program modification.
層次表的概念，爲程序的動態修改帶來了更好的前景。
Thus he imagined 'keeping the instruction tables in an abbreviated form, and expanding each table whenever we want it'—the work being done by the machine itself, using a table called EXPAND.
圖靈想到，要"維護一組精簡的指令表，在需要時再對其進行擴展"，而這個擴展工作可以由機器自動完成，依靠一個叫做EXPAND的表。The further he progressed with this idea, the more he saw that the ACE could be used to prepare, collate, and organise its own programs. He wrote:
圖靈不斷地拓展這個想法，在這個過程中，他越來越清楚地看到，ACE可以有能力自動地準備、檢查或編排程序。圖靈寫道：Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability.
編寫指令表，需要依賴數學家的計算經驗，或者說是一種解謎的能力。There will probably be a good deal of work of this kind to be done, for every known process has got to be translated into instruction table form at some stage.
這會帶來極大的工作量，因爲每一個程序都需要編寫成指令表。This work will go on whilst the machine is being built, in order to avoid some of the delay between the delivery of the machine and the production of results.
這些工作，在建造機器的過程中，就要開始解決，以避免機器交付後，需要再花很長時間才能讓它具有實際功能。Delay there must be, due to the virtually inevitable snags, for up to a point it is better to let the snags be there than to spend such time in design that there are none.
但是，這種滯後不可能完全避免，否則就需要幾十年的時間來建造機器，在一定程度上講，允許存在一些問題，比消耗這麼長的時間更爲明智。This process of constructing instruction tables should be very fascinating.
構建指令表的過程，是非常具有快感的，There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.
因爲這可以把任何機械化的工作，交給機器來自動執行。
