0xa

0xa is a hexadecimal literal commonly used in programming to denote the value ten (decimal). It is formed by the 0x prefix, which signals that the following digits are in base 16, where the single hex digit A represents decimal 10.

In hex notation, digits 0–9 represent values 0–9, and letters A–F (case-insensitive) represent values 10–15. Therefore 0xa equals decimal 10, and it can also be written as 0xA or 0x0a without changing its value. Hex literals like 0xa are widely supported in languages with C-style syntax, including C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Rust, where they are used in various low-level contexts such as bitwise operations, masks, flags, memory addresses, and color components in some programming environments.

A related concept is the ASCII/Unicode encoding of the value 10. The byte 0x0A (hex) corresponds to the line feed control character in ASCII and Unicode. This value is commonly used to denote a newline in Unix-like systems, illustrating how the same hexadecimal value can appear in both numeric literals and text encoding.

In practice, 0xa is interchangeable with 0xA and 0x0a in most codebases; the differences are purely stylistic. It is also a reminder that hexadecimal notation is often used to express binary data succinctly, since each hex digit represents four bits.