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In English and many other languages (including many that are written right-to-left), the integer part is at the left of the radix point, and the fraction part at the right of it. [24] A radix point is most often used in decimal (base 10) notation, when it is more commonly called the decimal point (the prefix deci-implying base 10).
Decimal fractions can also be expressed using scientific notation with negative exponents, such as 6.023 × 10 −7, a convenient alternative to the unwieldy 0.0000006023. The 10 −7 represents a denominator of 10 7. Dividing by 10 7 moves the decimal point seven places to the left.
For a positive number written in a conventional positional numeral system (such as binary or decimal), its fractional part hence corresponds to the digits appearing after the radix point, such as the decimal point in English. The result is a real number in the half-open interval [0, 1).
Positional decimal fractions appear for the first time in a book by the Arab mathematician Abu'l-Hasan al-Uqlidisi written in the 10th century. [31] The Jewish mathematician Immanuel Bonfils used decimal fractions around 1350 but did not develop any notation to represent them. [32]
Every terminating decimal representation can be written as a decimal fraction, a fraction whose denominator is a power of 10 (e.g. 1.585 = 1585 / 1000 ); it may also be written as a ratio of the form k / 2 n ·5 m (e.g. 1.585 = 317 / 2 3 ·5 2 ).
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 information) and binary (base-2) fractions. The advantage of decimal floating-point representation over decimal fixed-point and ...
Several characters in Unicode can serve as a decimal separator depending on the locale. Decimal fractions are represented in text as a sequence of decimal digit numerals with a decimal separator separating the whole-number portion from the fractional portion. For example, the decimal fraction for ¼ is expressed as zero-point-two-five ("0.25").
The duodecimal system, also known as base twelve or dozenal, is a positional numeral system using twelve as its base.In duodecimal, the number twelve is denoted "10", meaning 1 twelve and 0 units; in the decimal system, this number is instead written as "12" meaning 1 ten and 2 units, and the string "10" means ten.