雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第8章:水銀延時線(14)
In his philosophy it was almost an extravagance to supply addition and multiplication facilities as hardware,
since in principle they could be replaced by instructions applying only the more primitive logical operations of OR, AND, and NOT.
因爲它們都可以用指令來實現，而指令只需要更基本的邏輯操作：與、或、非。Indeed, the Colossus, when it was 'almost' programmed to do multiplication, had done just that.
事實上，巨人機就是這樣做的。
Since these primitive logical operations (absent from the EDVAC draft design) were incorporated in his plan for the ACE, he could indeed have omitted adders and multipliers, and still have had a universal machine.
他的ACE計劃就是由這些原始的邏輯操作（EDVAC草案中沒有）組成的，不需要加法和乘法部件。In reality, he did include special hardware to perform arithmetical tasks,
但在實際構造中，他確實使用了特定的硬件，來執行算術運算，but even there he decomposed the arithmetical operations into small pieces so that he could economise on hardware at the cost of more stored instructions.
但他把這些運算分解成很基本的硬件操作，以便可以用更多的指令存儲空間爲代價，來節省硬件成本。The whole conception was very puzzling to his contemporaries, to whom a computer was a machine to do sums, and a multiplier the very essence of its function.
這個概念，對於那個時代的人們來說，是極其難以理解的。在他們眼中，計算機就是用來計算的，而乘法是最基本的功能。To Alan Turing, the multiplier was a rather tiresome technicality; the heart lay in the logical control, which took the instructions from the memory, and put them into operation.
但在圖靈看來，乘法只是一個技術細節，邏輯控制纔是關鍵的核心，這個核心從存儲器中讀取指令，並執行它們。For similar reasons, his report placed no great emphasis upon the fact that the ACE would use binary arithmetic.
基於同樣的考慮，圖靈並沒有在報告中強調這一點：ACE將使用二進制。He stated the advantage of the binary representation, namely that electronic switches could naturally represent '1' and '0' by 'on' and 'off'.
他只是輕描淡寫地說到了二進制的優勢，即電子開關可以很自然地用"開/關"來表示"1/0"，僅此而已。But that was all, apart from a terse statement that the input and output to the machine would be in ordinary decimal notation, and that the conversion process would have 'virtually no outward and visible form'.
另外還有一個簡潔的闡述：機器的輸入和輸出將基於常用的十進制，而且兩個數制之間的轉換過程"不需要任何外在可見的部件"。
