In Australia you learn about base-N numbers in primary school, I don't understand why you see that as a huge undertaking. Ultimately if you ever have to check the mode of a file on *nix, or interact with bitmasks in any way, you're going to run into numbers in different bases. Not to mention memory addresses when debugging.

I mean, it's not _mandatory_ but it's something you'll run into eventually (though since I do quite low level systems programming, I expect that I see hex a lot more often than web developers -- though CSS colours are also in hex).

File modes are typically written in octal, not hex.

What my point was meant to be is that you deal with numbers in different bases all the time. Fixed.