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A decimal data type could be implemented as either a floating-point number or as a fixed-point number. In the fixed-point case, the denominator would be set to a fixed power of ten. In the floating-point case, a variable exponent would represent the power of ten to which the mantissa of the number is multiplied.
dc: "Desktop Calculator" arbitrary-precision RPN calculator that comes standard on most Unix-like systems. KCalc, Linux based scientific calculator; Maxima: a computer algebra system which bignum integers are directly inherited from its implementation language Common Lisp. In addition, it supports arbitrary-precision floating-point numbers ...
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.
The representation has a limited precision. For example, only 15 decimal digits can be represented with a 64-bit real. If a very small floating-point number is added to a large one, the result is just the large one. The small number was too small to even show up in 15 or 16 digits of resolution, and the computer effectively discards it.
Huberto M. Sierra noted in his 1956 patent "Floating Decimal Point Arithmetic Control Means for Calculator": [1] Thus under some conditions, the major portion of the significant data digits may lie beyond the capacity of the registers.
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.
Floating-point arithmetic operations are performed by software, and double precision is not supported at all. The extended format occupies three 16-bit words, with the extra space simply ignored. [3] The IBM System/360 supports a 32-bit "short" floating-point format and a 64-bit "long" floating-point format. [4]
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.