So it looks like what is supposed to be a simple enumeration or careful count of the nation's population this year will be anything but routine.

VOA: standard.2010.02.03

As I said, what we want to do is, we want to count the number of basic steps it takes to compute a computation as a function of input size.

我刚才提到了，我们要建立，一个根据输入大小的方法来计算,一个计算过程需要的时间,建立这个方法需要几步呢？

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选

Now I'm putting count in double quotes, not to make it a string, but to say, this is count generically. It could be counting one by one through the integers, it could also be taking a collection of data and going through them one by one. It could be doing counting in some other mechanism.

现在我把count用双引号标起来，不是说把它命名为一个字符串，而是说，这是一个通用的计数器,它可能是每一次减1的整数,也可能是拿一个集合的数据然后,一个一个的访问它们,也可能是以某种机制来计数。

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选