What benefits do octal have over decimal?
In: Mathematics
It is primarily used when you need to easily convert to or from binary. Because 8 is a power of two unlike 10 there is an exact number of binary digits per octal digit, 3 in the case of octal. So to convert between octal and binary you just need to replace each octal digit with the coresponding value in three binary digits. There is no math needed and no dependency between digits.
Octal was used a lot in the early days of computing. However in the 80s onwards it became more and more common to use hexadecimal. This is also a base of a power of two so it have all the same advantages. But it is four binary digits to one hexadecimal digit and not three binary digits to one octal digit. So there is an even number of hexadecimal digits in the common binary number lengths of 8, 16, 32 and so on. The disadavantage of hexadecimal is that it have more digits then decimal so in order to have all digits we need to use letters from the alphabet which can be confusing to use.
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