雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第8章:水銀延時線(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.
其中最重要的一點就是，該機器的通用性，使得數字可以在其內部編碼成任何需要的形式——當然也包括二進制，如果技術上需要的話。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.
收銀機不適合二進制，因爲對輸入和輸出進行轉換的過程，導致的代價遠遠大於好處。
On the universal ACE, however, no such conversion was required –
然而對於通用的ACE來說，這種轉換過程是不需要的——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.
這個說法聽起來有些矛盾，但卻是一個很簡單的事實，因爲該機器可以通過調用指令來執行任何程序。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.
舉個例子來說，要在ACE上實現前面所說的轉換，只需要增加兩條延遲線作爲存儲，這就是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.
當然這裏面還有一些工程細節需要考慮，以及一些特殊的電路。We are able to deal with these points without modification of the machine itself, by pure paperwork, eventually resulting in feeding in appropriate instructions.
我們可以在不改變機器本身的基礎上，通過單純的紙上工作，將相應的指令輸入進去。
