When considering the internal activities of a computer, we must deal with string of bits, some of which can be quite long. A long string of bits is often called a stream. Unfortunately, streams are difficult for the human mind to comprehend. Merely transcribing the pattern 101101010011 is tedious and prone error job. To simplify the representation of such bit patterns, therefore, we usually use a shorthand notation called hexadecimal notation, which takes advantage of the fact that bit patterns within a machine tend to have lengths in multiples of four. In particular, hexadecimal notation uses a single symbol to represent a pattern of four bits, meaning that a string of twelve bit can be represented by three symbols.
|
Bit pattern |
Hexadecimal representation |
|
0000 |
0 |
|
0001 |
1 |
|
0010 |
2 |
|
0011 |
3 |
|
0100 |
4 |
|
0101 |
5 |
|
0110 |
6 |
|
0111 |
7 |
|
1000 |
8 |
|
1001 |
9 |
|
1010 |
A |
|
1011 |
B |
|
1100 |
C |
|
1101 |
D |
|
1110 |
E |
|
1111 |
F |
The left column displays all possible bit pattern of length four; the right column shows the symbol used in hexadecimal notation to represent the bit pattern to its left. Using this system, the bit pattern 10110101 is represented as B5. This is obtained by dividing the bit pattern into substrings of length four and then representing each substring by its hexadecimal equivalent – 1011 is represented by B, and 0101 is represented by 5. In this manner, the 16-bit pattern 1010010011001000 can be reduced to the more palatable form A4C8
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