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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.
Double-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP64 or float64) is a floating-point number format, usually occupying 64 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. Double precision may be chosen when the range or precision of single precision would be insufficient.
The precision limit is different from the range limit, as it affects the significand, not the exponent. The significand is a binary fraction that doesn't necessarily perfectly match a decimal fraction. In many cases a sum of reciprocal powers of 2 does not match a specific decimal fraction, and the results of computations will be slightly off.
This gives from 33 to 36 significant decimal digits precision. If a decimal string with at most 33 significant digits is converted to the IEEE 754 quadruple-precision format, giving a normal number, and then converted back to a decimal string with the same number of digits, the final result should match the original string.
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.
[nb 2] For instance rounding 9.46 to one decimal gives 9.5, and then 10 when rounding to integer using rounding half to even, but would give 9 when rounded to integer directly. Borman and Chatfield [15] discuss the implications of double rounding when comparing data rounded to one decimal place to specification limits expressed using integers.
This alternative definition is significantly more widespread: machine epsilon is the difference between 1 and the next larger floating point number.This definition is used in language constants in Ada, C, C++, Fortran, MATLAB, Mathematica, Octave, Pascal, Python and Rust etc., and defined in textbooks like «Numerical Recipes» by Press et al.
Although log 10 ( 2 64) ≈ 19.266, this format is usually described as giving approximately eighteen significant digits of precision (the floor of log 10 ( 2 63), the minimum guaranteed precision). The use of decimal when talking about binary is unfortunate because most decimal fractions are recurring sequences in binary just as 2 / 3 is