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Some programming languages (or compilers for them) provide a built-in (primitive) or library decimal data type to represent non-repeating decimal fractions like 0.3 and −1.17 without rounding, and to do arithmetic on them. Examples are the decimal.Decimal or num7.Num type of Python, and analogous types provided by other languages.
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.
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.
SmartXML, a free programming language with integrated development environment (IDE) for mathematical calculations. Variables of BigNumber type can be used, or regular numbers can be converted to big numbers using conversion operator # (e.g., #2.3^2000.1). SmartXML big numbers can have up to 100,000,000 decimal digits and up to 100,000,000 whole ...
2.3434E−6 = 2.3434 × 10 −6 = 2.3434 × 0.000001 = 0.0000023434. The advantage of this scheme is that by using the exponent we can get a much wider range of numbers, even if the number of digits in the significand, or the "numeric precision", is much smaller than the range. Similar binary floating-point formats can be defined for computers.
Variable-length arithmetic operations are considerably slower than fixed-length format floating-point instructions. When high performance is not a requirement, but high precision is, variable length arithmetic can prove useful, though the actual accuracy of the result may not be known.
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 ...
A fixed-point data type uses the same, implied, denominator for all numbers. The denominator is usually a power of two.For example, in a hypothetical fixed-point system that uses the denominator 65,536 (2 16), the hexadecimal number 0x12345678 (0x1234.5678 with sixteen fractional bits to the right of the assumed radix point) means 0x12345678/65536 or 305419896/65536, 4660 + the fractional ...