I don ' t see why you ' d need a switch case for this . Regardless , that is not how switch cases work . Try something like . return pistol . bullet <| sep |> Broadly reported is fine . But a recently published article with citations and sources discussing recent developments on a tax policy affecting all Americans and other countries too seems relevant to me . Guess I ' m just an oddity . <| sep |> The tru bellingham way <| sep |> We needed more digits for 10 15 . We used letters because we ' re too lazy to make some up . Okay , I ' ve had a very nice message from an automoderator , apparently my explanation was too short . Let ' s call the above the TLDR and dive in , shall we ? Hexadecimal means we use 16 digits , as opposed to the ten digits we use in everyday life . It ' s commonly used in computerrelated stuff because computers think in binary only two digits , 0 and 1 and we think in decimal 10 digits . Now , since we think in decimal , when we use two digits to write a number , the digit on the left is worth ten times more than the digit on the right the 1 in 10 is worth ten times the 1 in 1 . The digit on the left of that one is worth ten times more than the digit before the 2 in 200 is worth ten times the 2 in 20 , or 10 x 10 100 times the 2 in 2 In binary , the digit on the left is only worth twice the digit on the right . We count 0 , then 1 , then we run out of digits and have to go directly to 10 to write the number two . We then write three 11 , then four 100 , five 101 , six 110 , seven 111 , eight 1000 and so on . So we can write up to 1111 fifteen with four digits , and this struck early computer scientists as a good balance between 10 base and 2 base , so we started using it a lot . At this point , computer screens had few pixels remember the glowing green lines of characters in the matrix ? Or the ones in fallout ? Computer screens looked a bit like that and fewer bytes of memory . Having the computer translate to base 10 every time , and taking up screen real estate to display it was not practical , so we had to write the numbers from 10 to 15 with a single digit . Otherwise , we ' d have screwed the alignment at a time where aligned digits was a necessary tool of programming . Since we did not wanna bother with coming up with new shapes , we reused the letters A to F as digits for the numbers ten to fifteen