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Hexadecimal (also known as base-16 or simply hex) is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of sixteen. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using ten symbols, hexadecimal uses sixteen distinct symbols, most often the symbols "0"–"9" to represent values 0 to 9 and "A"–"F" to represent values from ten to fifteen.
"A base is a natural number B whose powers (B multiplied by itself some number of times) are specially designated within a numerical system." [1]: 38 The term is not equivalent to radix, as it applies to all numerical notation systems (not just positional ones with a radix) and most systems of spoken numbers. [1]
Computer engineers often need to write out binary quantities, but in practice writing out a binary number such as 1001001101010001 is tedious and prone to errors. Therefore, binary quantities are written in a base-8, or "octal", or, much more commonly, a base-16, "hexadecimal" (hex), number format. In the decimal system, there are 10 digits, 0 ...
Another common way of expressing the base is writing it as a decimal subscript after the number that is being represented (this notation is used in this article). 1111011 2 implies that the number 1111011 is a base-2 number, equal to 123 10 (a decimal notation representation), 173 8 and 7B 16 (hexadecimal).
A number has a terminating or repeating expansion if and only if it is rational; this does not depend on the base. A number that terminates in one base may repeat in another (thus 0.3 10 = 0.0100110011001... 2). An irrational number stays aperiodic (with an infinite number of non-repeating digits) in all integral bases.
Hexadecimal: Base 16, widely used by computer system designers and programmers, as it provides a more human-friendly representation of binary-coded values. Octal: Base 8, occasionally used by computer system designers and programmers. Duodecimal: Base 12, a numeral system that is convenient because of the many factors of 12.
The octal and hexadecimal systems are often used in computing because of their ease as shorthand for binary. Every hexadecimal digit corresponds to a sequence of four binary digits, since sixteen is the fourth power of two; for example, hexadecimal 78 16 is binary 111 1000 2. Similarly, every octal digit corresponds to a unique sequence of ...
This is because the radix of the hexadecimal system (16) is a power of the radix of the binary system (2). More specifically, 16 = 2 4, so it takes four digits of binary to represent one digit of hexadecimal, as shown in the adjacent table. To convert a hexadecimal number into its binary equivalent, simply substitute the corresponding binary ...