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A decimal data type could be implemented as either a floating-point number or as a fixed-point number. In the fixed-point case, the denominator would be set to a fixed power of ten. In the floating-point case, a variable exponent would represent the power of ten to which the mantissa of the number is multiplied.
The IEEE standard stores the sign, exponent, and significand in separate fields of a floating point word, each of which has a fixed width (number of bits). The two most commonly used levels of precision for floating-point numbers are single precision and double precision.
"Instead of using a single floating-point number as approximation for the value of a real variable in the mathematical model under investigation, interval arithmetic acknowledges limited precision by associating with the variable a set of reals as possible values.
Example: (expt 10 100) produces the expected (large) result. Exact numbers also include rationals, so (/ 3 4) produces 3/4. Arbitrary precision floating point numbers are included in the standard library math/bigfloat module. Raku: Rakudo supports Int and FatRat data types that promote to arbitrary-precision integers and rationals.
The "decimal" data type of the C# and Python programming languages, and the decimal formats of the IEEE 754-2008 standard, are designed to avoid the problems of binary floating-point representations when applied to human-entered exact decimal values, and make the arithmetic always behave as expected when numbers are printed in decimal.
If approximate values of factorial numbers are desired, Stirling's approximation gives good results using floating-point arithmetic. The largest representable value for a fixed-size integer variable may be exceeded even for relatively small arguments as shown in the table below.
The advantage of decimal floating-point representation over decimal fixed-point and integer representation is that it supports a much wider range of values. For example, while a fixed-point representation that allocates 8 decimal digits and 2 decimal places can represent the numbers 123456.78, 8765.43, 123.00, and so on, a floating-point ...
Many programming languages provide functions that can be used to divide a floating point number by a power of two. For example, the Java programming language provides the method java.lang.Math.scalb for scaling by a power of two, [7] and the C programming language provides the function ldexp for the same purpose. [8]