双语畅销书《艾伦图灵传》第9章:退隐山林(18)
日期:2019-09-26 17:20

(单词翻译:单击)

and the hardware more or less obliged each sub-routine to be stored on a new track of the drum, to be transferred in toto as required.
子程序的存储和传输,或多或少也是由硬件来负责的。
The Turing scheme coped with this, but he did not bother with a system for subroutines nested to any depth.
图灵要考虑这些问题,他考虑嵌套任意深度的子程序。
He referred to this possibility in a rather flippant passage of the Handbook: The sub-routines of any routine may themselves have sub-routines.
在《手册》的另一段中,他提到了这种可能性:任何程序的子程序,本身都可以再含有子程序。
This is like the case of the bigger and lesser fleas.
这就好比每一只跳蚤都可以生小跳蚤,而小跳蚤还可以继续生小跳蚤。
but he left this for the user to organise. His own 'Scheme A' only allowed for one level of sub-routine calling.
他把这个留给使用者自行规划,他自己的“范例A”中只介绍了一层子程序的调用。
The Handbook brought out many of the problems of communication that he faced at Manchester.
这本手册反映了图灵在曼彻斯特遇到的沟通障碍。
To Williams and the other engineers, a mathematician was someone who knew how to do calculations, in particular they saw binary notation as something new introduced to them by mathematics.
对于威廉姆斯和其他工程师来说,数学家就是懂得如何进行计算的人,他们认为二进制记数这样的东西,就是由数学家引进来的。
To Alan Turing, however, all their schemes with base-32 arithmetic and the rest were merely simple illustrations of the deeper fact that mathematicians were free to employ symbolism in any way they chose.
然而对图灵来说,这些32进制的计算范例,以及其它的一些简单例子,表明了一个更深层的事实,那就是数学家可以自由地根据需要,选择任何一种符号记法。
To him, it was obvious that a symbol had no intrinsic connection with the entity that it symbolised,
对他来说,一个符号与它代表的东西之间,并没有什么本质上的明显关系,
and so a long paragraph at the beginning of the Handbook explained how it was that there existed a convention according to which sequences of pulses could be interpreted as numbers.
因此在《手册》的开篇,他就解释了关于用数字来表示脉冲序列的一系列人为约定。
While this was a far more accurate and also more creative idea than the usual statement that the machine 'stored the numbers',
这比通常的“机器存储数字”的说法要准确的多,
it was not immediately helpful to the person who had never before known that numbers could be expressed other than in the scale of ten.
但对于那些根本不知道数字还可以用非十进制来表示的人们来说,这几乎没有任何直接的帮助。

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