Right. It lets you see the bits more easily: 0-F is a good representation of 4 bits.
Say i were to name a random hex value like #$9C right now it would take me a few seconds to convert that to decimal in my head though... 156 took me a few seconds to sort out. I don't have to think about what 156 means in decimal because i just know what it is.
I'm not quite there, but close to being bilingual (binumeral?) between decimal and hex, and I think it's all about developing better intuition for each digit and their relationships.
For instance, you say 0x9C... that's just over half (0x80) of 0x100, close to 2/3rds (0xAA). Given in embedded we're often using a byte to represent a quantity, that gives enough feel.
I should practice multiplying hex by hand, I reckon that would assist in getting there.
Replying to sibling since we've maxxed out comment depth...
> It was $62 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday. I can't just go displaying that in a program. Nor is it meaningful to me without a decimal conversion.
It's just as meaningless to me even if you do the conversion to base10 for display... I don't do deg F intuitively and would have to convert to Celsius in my head. It's all about what we are familiar with.
Right but the world runs on base 10 is all i'm trying to say. It's needlessly difficult to use anything else (aside from hex or binary in very specific situations). In some college sophomore philosophy class you could argue for base 27 but it doesn't make your system usable or intelligible.
> It's needlessly difficult to use anything else (aside from hex or binary in very specific situations)
Totally agree. I'm a programmer, so I do need to know those, and as an embedded developer, even more. The average person not so much. I thought that's what this particular thread was all about.
Sure, I can work it out, and I do use F when talking to friends from the USA. My only point was that I deal with hex numbers all day, so they're more intuitive to me than Fahrenheit is.
It's interesting that octal used to be popular and isn't any more. I'm not familiar with how that culture shift happened, but I remember learning C in the 80s and thinking it was odd that it supported octal when I'd never seen it anywhere else.
For example we think of 10, 100, 50 as nice round convenient quantities.
CPUs see 16, 256, 2048 as convenient quantities--in hex that's visible: 0x10, 0x100, 0x800.