双语畅销书《艾伦图灵传》第9章:退隐山林(16)
日期:2019-09-23 15:30

(单词翻译:单击)

Now at Manchester, he had the opportunity, in principle, to put this into practice-for the machine hardware had not been designed to pander to the programmer.
现在在曼彻斯特,他有机会实现他自己的想法,因为这台机器的硬件设计,并没有故意迎合编程人员。
However, by 1949 he had lost interest in doing this kind of work, The fussy little detail of binary to decimal conversion, for instance, he now found not worth bothering about.
但是现在,也就是1949年,他已经对这些“杂七杂八的小细节”失去兴趣了,比如说二进制和十进制之间的转换,他觉得完全没有必要。
He himself found it simple to work directly in the base-32 arithmetic in which the machine could be regarded as working, and expected other people to do the same.
他发现,直接用32进制进行思考是很简单的,而且希望其他人都这样做。
To use base-32 arithmetic it was necessary to find 32 symbols for the 32 different 'digits'.
要在纸上使用32进制,就必须为32个不同的“数字”找到32个不同的符号。
Here he took over the system already used by the engineers, in which they labelled the five-bit combinations according to the Baudot teleprinter code.
图灵直接使用了博多电传码,来取代工程师们使用的五位组合码。
Thus the 'twenty-two' digit, corresponding to the sequence 10110 of binary digits, would be written as 'P'.
比如说22这个数,在五位二进制码中表示为10110,而在博多码中可以用“P”来表示。
To work in this system meant memorising the Baudot code and the multiplication table as expressed in it-something he, but few others, found easy.
要想以这种方式进行思考,就必须把博多码及其乘法表背下来,图灵觉得这个很简单,但很少有其他人这么认为。
The ostensible reason for sticking to this hideously primitive form of coding, which entailed so much work for the user.
因为这些外在的原因,使原始的编码显得十分可怕,使用者承受着巨大的压力。
was that the cathode ray tube storage made it possible-indeed necessary-to check the contents of the store by 'peeping', as Alan called it, at a monitor tube.
这时候阴极射线管的一项特性起到了作用,那就是可以让人们“查看”存储器里的内容,图灵称之为“显像管”。
He insisted that what one saw as spots on the tube had to correspond digit by digit to the program that had been written out.
他强调,要保证使用者看到的内容,与程序写出来的内容是逐位对应的。
To maintain this principle of correspondence, it was actually necessary to write out the base-32 numbers backwards.
但要想实现这种对应,就必须将那些32进制的数倒序地写出来。
Another awkwardness arose on account of the five-bit combinations which did not correspond to a letter of the alphabet on the Baudot code. (It was the same problem that the Rockex system overcame.)
另一件尴尬的事情是,在博多编码中,五位组合码并不都能与字母对应(劳凯克斯机也遇到了这个问题)。

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