How does hexadecimal work in Japanese?

Question

I'm aware this is more of a StackOverflow question. If any of you are computer programmers who speak Japanese: how does hexadecimal work? I mean the system of numbers which is counted 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F. Do you use Roman letters and Arabic numbers? Is it all in kanji?

Answer 1

Given that the format 0x[0-9A-F] is baked into nearly every modern computer language, there aren't any other options for representing them in text. But there is still the question of pronouncing them.

I suspect the answer will depend on the individual company culture to some extent.

At our company, the digits are pronounced in Japanese: ぜろ、いち、に... and the letters are pronounced similarly to the English: ええ、びい、しい、でぃい、いい、えふ. One oddball case is zero, which is mixed between ぜろ and まる. It's not even unusual to have more than one pronunciation for zero used while reading off the same number.

This actually causes a bit of confusion for those of us moving quickly between the two systems, since the American side of the company uses a phonetic alphabet when reading off things like error codes. ie, the Japanese programmers will say "びい、いい、いい、えふ", the Americans will say "bravo, echo, echo, fox".