As a programming newbie or a curious individual, you might wonder why hexadecimal is preferred over binary number systems.
There are several reasons why programmers have chosen a hexadecimal number system over a binary or any other known number base.
Programmers prefer Hexadecimal to Binary because the format of hex numbers is more compact than binary numbers because they can represent large binary numbers with fewer digits.
As a result, they are easier to understand and less terrifying to humans than long binary strings of 1s and 0s.
Before we go into the reasons, it is important to understand how both hexadecimal and binary systems works underneath the hood.
The Binary Number System
Binary is a number system in which there are only two possible values for each digit 0 or 1, which is the basis for all binary code used in computing systems.
Converting 365 in decimal (base 10) will yield 101101101.
The major drawback with binary systems is that it quickly appears voluminous, especially dealing with large decimal numbers conversions.
The Hexadecimal Number System
Hexadecimal is a numbering system with a base of 16. It can be used to represent large numbers with fewer digits.
In this system, there are 16 symbols or possible digit values from 0 to 9, followed by six alphabetic characters — A, B, C, D, E, and F. These characters are used to represent decimal values from 10 to 15 in single bits.
3 Core Reasons Why Programmers Prefer Hexadecimal To Binary
There are several reasons why programmers prefer Hexadecimal to the Binary number system. In this aspect, we shall discuss these reasons.
1. The hexadecimal number system is short and compact
The major benefit of hexadecimal over binary lies in its compacted nature.
In computing systems, the binary string equivalents of large decimal numbers can become quite long. When 16- or 32-bit numbers are involved, it becomes difficult to read and write them without producing errors.
These problems can be overcome by arranging the binary numbers into groups of four bits, i.e., by using the hexadecimal numbering system.
For instance, take the decimal number 45004503 and try converting it to binary.
In binary, it yields 10101011101011011011010111. Quite a lot of numbers here.
However, the hex equivalent is 2AEB6D7.
Writing in hexadecimal happens to be less messy and less prone to errors.
2. Hexadecimal number offers better bit and byte representation
In hex, four digits of a binary number can be represented by a single hex digit.
This implies that each hex maps to 4 bits.
8 bit makes a byte but these 8 digits can be represented with just 2 hex.
Dividing a binary number into 4-bit sets means that each set can have a possible value of between 0000 and 1111, allowing 16 number combinations from 0 to 15. With the base value as 16, the maximum value of a digit is 15.
Since 2 hex represents a byte it’s much easier to know the bytes in a hexadecimal number.
For example, the bytes in 5B03219F will be written like 5B 03 21 9F.
3. It is easier to represent colors, bitmasks, memory addresses and network addresses in hexadecimal.
The hexadecimal system makes it easier to represent colors on websites with codes.
You will often see color codes like FFAA54. This symbol is hexadecimal of three bytes and tells the depth of red, green and blue (RGB) in the given color.
Imagine using binary numbers to represent RGB color notation…I can’t even think about it.
Bit masks are used to access specific bits in a byte of data and are represented in hexadecimal same as memory and network addresses.
Conclusion
There are several reasons why programmers prefer hexadecimal to binary systems. The most important one is that it is the easiest way to data representation and it’s compact.
Compared to decimal and binary, other reasons why hexadecimal is much more preferred among programmers include:
- it is easier to know the number of bytes
- it is short and can easily fit onto system screens
- A better number representation system for colors, bitmasks, memory and network addresses
- it is easy to see and read (less terrifying)
- it includes letters which makes it fun.
And it’s a wrap.
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