Although quaternary has limited practical use, it can be helpful if it is ever necessary to perform hexadecimal arithmetic without a calculator.
Then, arithmetic can be performed relatively easily before converting the end result back to hexadecimal.
Quaternary is convenient for this purpose, since numbers have only half the digit length compared to binary, while still having very simple multiplication and addition tables with only three unique non-trivial elements.
Due to having only factors of two, many quaternary fractions have repeating digits, although these tend to be fairly simple: Many or all of the Chumashan languages (spoken by the Native American Chumash peoples) originally used a quaternary numeral system, in which the names for numbers were structured according to multiples of four and sixteen, instead of ten.
There is a surviving list of Ventureño language number words up to thirty-two written down by a Spanish priest ca.
[2] For example, the nucleotide sequence GATTACA can be represented by the quaternary number 2033010 (= decimal 9156 or binary 10 00 11 11 00 01 00).