Besides binary numbers, another type of number commonly found in computers are the hexadecimal numbers. You may encounter them when talking about colors, RGB, RGBA, memory addresses in a computer, or even editing the bytes of a file with a hex editor. But what are hexadecimal numbers? How do they work?
Hexadecimal numbers, or numbers of base 16, are numbers that don't go from 0 to 9 like the decimal numbers (which are of base 10) that we normally use, but instead go from 0 to 15. That is, after the digit 9, a hexadecimal number has another 6 digits to go through before adding an hexadecimal place to the left. These 6 digits are represented by the letters ABCDEF. Given this, in hexadecimal, we count: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A (ten), B (eleven), C (twelve), D (thirteen), E (fourteen), F (fifteen), 10 (sixsteen), 11 (17)... 19 (25), 1A (26)... 1F (31), 20 (32)... A0 (160)... FF (255), 100 (256), and so on.
Leave a Reply