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There are two common rounding rules, round-by-chop and round-to-nearest. The IEEE standard uses round-to-nearest. Round-by-chop: The base-expansion of is truncated after the ()-th digit. This rounding rule is biased because it always moves the result toward zero.
[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.
[6] [2] [7] In some specialized contexts, the word decimal is instead used for this purpose (such as in International Civil Aviation Organization-regulated air traffic control communications). In mathematics, the decimal separator is a type of radix point, a term that also applies to number systems with bases other than ten.
For example, the decimal number 123456789 cannot be exactly represented if only eight decimal digits of precision are available (it would be rounded to one of the two straddling representable values, 12345678 × 10 1 or 12345679 × 10 1), the same applies to non-terminating digits (. 5 to be rounded to either .55555555 or .55555556).
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.
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.
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If this number is truncated to 4 decimal places, the result is 3.141. Rounding is a similar process in which the last preserved digit is increased by one if the next digit is 5 or greater but remains the same if the next digit is less than 5, so that the rounded number is the best approximation of a given precision for the original number.