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The final conversion is from binary to decimal fractions. The only difficulty arises with repeating fractions, but otherwise the method is to shift the fraction to an integer, convert it as above, and then divide by the appropriate power of two in the decimal base. For example:
In computer science, the double dabble algorithm is used to convert binary numbers into binary-coded decimal (BCD) notation. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It is also known as the shift-and-add -3 algorithm , and can be implemented using a small number of gates in computer hardware, but at the expense of high latency .
In the decimal encoding, it is encoded as a series of p decimal digits (using the densely packed decimal (DPD) encoding). This makes conversion to decimal form efficient, but requires a specialized decimal ALU to process. In the binary integer decimal (BID) encoding, it is encoded as a binary number.
For example, the smallest positive number that can be represented in binary64 is 2 −1074; contributions to the −1074 figure include the emin value −1022 and all but one of the 53 significand bits (2 −1022 − (53 − 1) = 2 −1074). Decimal digits is the precision of the format expressed in terms of an equivalent number of decimal digits.
In particular, the examples are simple particular cases (simple values exactly representable in binary, without an exponent part). This section is also probably off-topic: this is not an article about conversion, and conversion from decimal using decimal arithmetic (as opposed to conversion from a character string) is uncommon.
If errors in representation and computation are more important than the speed of conversion to and from display, a scaled binary representation may be used, which stores a decimal number as a binary-encoded integer and a binary-encoded signed decimal exponent. For example, 0.2 can be represented as 2 × 10 −1.
When the number becomes large, conversion to decimal is very tedious. However, when mapping to hexadecimal, it is trivial to regard the binary string as 4-digit groups and map each to a single hexadecimal digit. [31] This example shows the conversion of a binary number to decimal, mapping each digit to the decimal value, and adding the results.
When converting from binary to octal every 3 bits relate to one and only one octal digit. Hexadecimal, decimal, octal, and a wide variety of other bases have been used for binary-to-text encoding, implementations of arbitrary-precision arithmetic, and other applications. For a list of bases and their applications, see list of numeral systems.