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Single precision is termed REAL in Fortran; [1] SINGLE-FLOAT in Common Lisp; [2] float in C, C++, C# and Java; [3] Float in Haskell [4] and Swift; [5] and Single in Object Pascal , Visual Basic, and MATLAB. However, float in Python, Ruby, PHP, and OCaml and single in versions of Octave before 3.2 refer to double-precision numbers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In IEEE 754 parlance, there are 10 bits of significand, but there are 11 bits of significand precision (log 10 (2 11) ≈ 3.311 decimal digits, or 4 digits ± slightly less than 5 units in the last place).
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.
"PIC S9999", for example, would require a signed variable of four decimal digits precision. If specified as a binary field, this would select a 16-bit signed type on most platforms. If specified as a binary field, this would select a 16-bit signed type on most platforms.