雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第9章:退隱山林(60)

Programming revolved around the process of 'bringing down' data and instructions from the drum to the tubes, and sending them back again, 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.

編程完全圍繞着把數據和指令從磁鼓取到射線管的過程，以及再把它們送回去。子程序的存儲和傳輸，或多或少也是由硬件來負責的。

The Turing scheme coped with this, but he did not bother with a system for subroutines nested to any depth.

圖靈要考慮這些問題，他考慮嵌套任意深度的子程序。

He referred to this possibility in a rather flippant passage of the Handbook:

在《手冊》的另一段中，他提到了這種可能性：

The sub-routines of any routine may themselves have sub-routines. This is like the case of the bigger and lesser fleas.

任何程序的子程序，本身都可以再含有子程序。這就好比每一隻跳蚤都可以生小跳蚤，而小跳蚤還可以繼續生小跳蚤。

but he left this for the user to organise. His own 'Scheme A' only allowed for one level of sub-routine calling.

他把這個留給使用者自行規劃，他自己的"範例A"中只介紹了一層子程序的調用。

The Handbook brought out many of the problems of communication that he faced at Manchester.

這本手冊，反映了圖靈在曼徹斯特遇到的溝通障礙。

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'.

對於威廉姆斯和其他工程師來說，數學家就是懂得如何進行計算的人，他們認爲二進制記數這樣的東西，就是由數學家引進來的。

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.

然而對圖靈來說，這些32進制的計算範例，以及其它的一些簡單例子，表明了一個更深層的事實，那就是數學家可以自由地根據需要，選擇任何一種符號記法。

To him it was obvious that a symbol had no intrinsic connection with the entity that it symbolised, 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.

對他來說，一個符號與它代表的東西之間，並沒有什麼本質上的明顯關係，因此在《手冊》的開篇，他就解釋了關於用數字來表示脈衝序列的一系列人爲約定。

While this was a far more accurate and also more creative idea than the usual statement that the machine 'stored the numbers', 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.

這比通常的"機器存儲數字"的說法要準確的多，但對於那些根本不知道數字還可以用非十進制來表示的人們來說，這幾乎沒有任何直接的幫助。

It was not that Alan despised doing routine, detailed work within a symbolism such as the Manchester machine demanded: but as in Computable Numbers arid the ACE report he tended to veer from the abstract to the detailed in a way that made sense to him, but not to others.

圖靈並不是故意不走尋常路，但就像《可計算數》和ACE的報告一樣，他在處理抽象和具體的關係時，總是用一套他自己覺得有道理的方法，而不考慮其他人。

The development that could have absorbed both his liberated understanding of symbolism, and his willingness to do the donkey work when necessary, was that of designing programming languages, the development he described as 'obvious' in 1947.

這種發展既吸收了他對符號的自由理解，也吸收了他在必要時願意做繁重工作的意願，那就是設計編程語言，他在1947年稱這種發展是“顯而易見的”。