Advantage of initialization variable to Hexadecimal

Question

I am working on a hash function coded in c++ and i was wondering why main constant variables are initialized with hex value. Like

unsigned long i= 0x428a2f98 ;

Is this done for the sake of performance if yes than please explain, because i think it have be converted to integer value at some point.

Answer 1

The way constants defined in the source code does not do anything for performance, as it will be converted to binary representation by compiler. It is there only for readability, for example binary data can be easier interpreted in hex than decimal notation.