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Decimal floating-point (DFP) arithmetic refers to both a representation and operations on decimal floating-point numbers. Working directly with decimal (base-10) fractions can avoid the rounding errors that otherwise typically occur when converting between decimal fractions (common in human-entered data, such as measurements or financial ...
Huberto M. Sierra noted in his 1956 patent "Floating Decimal Point Arithmetic Control Means for Calculator": [1] Thus under some conditions, the major portion of the significant data digits may lie beyond the capacity of the registers. Therefore, the result obtained may have little meaning if not totally erroneous.
A decimal separator is a symbol that separates the integer part from the fractional part of a number written in decimal form. Different countries officially designate different symbols for use as the separator. The choice of symbol can also affect the choice of symbol for the thousands separator used in digit grouping.
In the IEEE standard the base is binary, i.e. =, and normalization is used.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).
Like whole numbers, fractions obey the commutative, associative, and distributive laws, and the rule against division by zero. Mixed-number arithmetic can be performed either by converting each mixed number to an improper fraction, or by treating each as a sum of integer and fractional parts.
Fractional numbers are supported on most programming languages as floating-point numbers or fixed-point numbers. However, such representations typically restrict the denominator to a power of two. Most decimal fractions (or most fractions in general) cannot be represented exactly as a fraction with a denominator that is a power of two.
A fixed-point representation of a fractional number is essentially an integer that is to be implicitly multiplied by a fixed scaling factor. For example, the value 1.23 can be stored in a variable as the integer value 1230 with implicit scaling factor of 1/1000 (meaning that the last 3 decimal digits are implicitly assumed to be a decimal fraction), and the value 1 230 000 can be represented ...
Moreover, in the standard decimal representation of , an infinite sequence of trailing 0's appearing after the decimal point is omitted, along with the decimal point itself if is an integer. Certain procedures for constructing the decimal expansion of x {\displaystyle x} will avoid the problem of trailing 9's.