Contents

• What are number bases?
• Why do we use different number bases in computer programming?

What are number bases?

A number base is a mathematical term which explains how to interpret a series of digits, as a numerical value.

Most of us will have been taught to use a base 10 numbering system, although you may not be aware of this. A base 10 numbering system means that each single digit will represent one of 10 possible values (0-9).

In school you probably learned that any number – let's take 2147 – can be broken down into columns to show that it is equal to 2x1000 + 1x100 + 4x10 + 7x1. These columns represent the orders of magnitude of our base number. The units column represents our base number of 10, with an exponent of 0. Our tens column represents our base number of 10 with an exponent of 1. This is shown in the table below. 

Binary is simple an alternative number base to use which has only two possible values per digit – 0 or 1. We can break any number down into its component digits just like we can with base 10, this is demonstrated in the table below using the same value of 2147. If you sum up the representative values in the value row you'll find that it equates to exactly the same as when we represent the value in base 10. This shows us that base 10 "2147" is equivalent to base 2 "100001100011".

So why do we use base 2 (and other number bases) in computer programming?

First lets not think of all the complexity of a computer system, and instead focus on a single, simple circuit.

State count Lamp state 0 0 (off) 1 1 (on)

Above is a circuit diagram which shows a power source, a switch and a lamp. This circuit has different operating states, the lamp will be off when the switch is open, or the lamp will be on when the switch is closed. Next to the circuit below we have listed the states in a table. Notice we've started counting our states from zero instead of 1 as you might initially be tempted to do, and we have also labelled our off state as "0" and our on state as "1". The reasoning for why we've done this will be explained shortly.

Now of course this circuit isn't very interesting, so lets take a look at what would happen if we were to add more states to this circuit and see how we might list these states in a table.

State count Lamp 1 state Lamp 0 state 0 0 (off) 0 (off) 1 0 (off) 1 (on) 2 1 (on) 0 (off) 3 1 (on) 1 (on)

If you have a keen eye you may notice that the table layout looks very similar to the base two number example that we've shown above. If instead of "lamp 0" we had 2⁰ and multiply this by the state of that lamp (0 or 1), then repeat the process for "lamp 1" (which maps to 2¹ multiplied by the state in that row) the resulting number that we obtain by adding together all the states in the circuit is the same as our state count. This is why we represent off and on as 0 and 1 respectively, and it's also a major reason in computer science that we generally start counting from zero instead of one - our default off state for all digits sums to zero.

This idea can be extended to as many digits as required (as shown with the number example previously), with each digit representing a single wire state of off or on (0 or 1 respectively). If we want to represent multiple wires then we can simply add an additional column to our number. Below is a table showing how 4 wires would be represented in base 10 (decimal) and base 2 (binary).