Why is there hexadecimal and decimal numbers in computing?

Question

Why not just hexadecimal or decimal or its own? why both? Why convert ASCII into both then binary? why not just keep one?

Answer 1

Decimal numbers are used in computing because that is the number system humans use. It is what is familiar to us. Hexadecimal has the advantage of being able to express larger numbers in a more compact form. Binary is used because the number system arises naturally in the design of digital logic circuits.

Answer 2

Computers use electricity to generate signals which are on or off, ie, a voltage or no volts, this is known as binary because bi means two, so binary is a signal (a voltage DC) or no volts. Binary is the basis for all computer and line transmission systems.

Unfortunately it does not give you enough options to convert decimal, which is what humans use, to a data form that can transmit characters over or through a digital system.

This is where ASCII comes in.

The data has to be converted to Octal, not much used now, or Hexadecimal, which is.

So if you are trying to learn about data forget decimal and learn hex.

http://www.janeg.ca/scjp/oper/binhex.html

Regards, Bob.

Answer 3

hexadecimal is just a "shorthand" way of expressing binary and uses all the bits the number takes up

so its more efficient in use of memory than decimal



Take number 15(decimal) this takes up 8 bits (4 bits for the 1 and four bits for the 5)

However this in hexadecimal = F = just 4 bits in binary

So you have used 1/2 the amount of memory required to store the number in hexadecimal than in decimal



Repeat this over loads of numbers and you can save loads of memory.



And its a hellova lot easier to write big numbers as hexadecimal than long strings of binary and you are FAR less likely to make mistakes in writing them

(you try writing a big number represented as 32 binary bits without making a mistake compared to 8 hexadecimal characters. Then have a look what FFFFFFFF hexadecimal is in decimal, both as a number and as the number of digits in that number.)

Answer 4

Computers are made to manipulate binary data, but humans find it harder to work with the large number of digits for even a relatively small binary number. For us more limited humans, it is much easier to map binary to hexadecimal than to decimal because each hexadecimal digit maps to a whole number of bits. So larger numbers can be expressed by fewer digits in hexadecimal

Answer 5

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