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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 representation with 8 decimal digits could also represent 1.2345678, 1234567.8, 0.000012345678, 12345678000000000, and so on.
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.
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.
A floating-point variable can represent a wider range of numbers than a fixed-point variable of the same bit width at the cost of precision. A signed 32-bit integer variable has a maximum value of 2 31 − 1 = 2,147,483,647, whereas an IEEE 754 32-bit base-2 floating-point variable has a maximum value of (2 − 2 −23) × 2 127 ≈ 3.4028235 ...
In Visual Basic .NET, the primitive data types consist of 4 integral types, 2 floating-point types, a 16-byte decimal type, a Boolean type, a date/time type, a Unicode character type, and a Unicode string type. [21]
IEEE 754 specifies additional floating-point formats, including 32-bit base-2 single precision and, more recently, base-10 representations (decimal floating point). One of the first programming languages to provide floating-point data types was Fortran .
Go: the standard library package math/big implements arbitrary-precision integers (Int type), rational numbers (Rat type), and floating-point numbers (Float type) Guile: the built-in exact numbers are of arbitrary precision. Example: (expt 10 100) produces the expected (large) result. Exact numbers also include rationals, so (/ 3 4) produces 3/4.
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.