When giving a value to a variable, is there any advantage to give it in a value hexadecimal
instead of decimal?
Does it save some cycles of calculations for the compiler or is it just some kind of
"snobbery" when programmers use hex when they could just use decimal instead?
Using Windows 10 with Code Blocks and MingW.
In some situations hex is clearer to read, because when you're used to it, you can quickly count in your mind which bytes are 1 and which are 0.
Xmas and Halloween
Dec 25 == Oct 31
If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.
If at first you don't succeed, try writing your phone number on the exam paper.
There is no performance advantage -- you should just use whatever is more readable in the given situation.Originally Posted by Ducky
For instance, If I wanted to set someones age to 15:
age = 15; // readable
age = 0xF; // what?
Now let's say we want to set up a mask to get the lowest byte of information from a larger variable:
byte_mask = 255; // What does this mean?
byte_mask = 0xFF; // Makes sense.
bit∙hub [bit-huhb] n. A source and destination for information.
At compile time, who cares?
Mainframe assembler programmer by trade. C coder when I can.
It's all just bits to the computer anyway, so the compiler "transforms" it into the correct opcode, hex, decimal, octal or whatever.
Ok, thank you everybody, i understand it better now.
@Salem
Yes i knew this one. Its a funny one. :-)
Using Windows 10 with Code Blocks and MingW.
Huh?
EDIT: Nevermind, now I see. I thought you were still talking about Hex...
Last edited by cpjust; 08-19-2009 at 08:19 PM.
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There is an advantage for floating-point values. If you want to ensure that you get the same floating-point value using any compiler and/or runtime, use hexadecimal. This is because hex to binary conversion is exact, whereas decimal to binary conversion is inexact (in general) and can vary across platforms.
The only flies in that ointment are (i) hexadecimal floating point numbers are not supported by standard C++ (are they bringing that in from C99 into the next standard?) and/or (ii) if they use different internal representations the hex format will change as well (if you are referring to the bit patterns).
