History of the threepence the possible advent of a decimal currency at the time (see florin), when the 3d at 1/80th of a pound would not have fitted within a decimal system). Currency silver threepences from 1838 to 1926 were of identical design and cannot usually be distinguished except in the best conditions when the higher striking standard of the maundy coins stand out; this resulted in the curious legal anomaly that when the currency was decimalised in 1971 "all" silver threepences from 1870 onwards were revalued at three new pence, not just the maundy coins. Threepences were produced with both the "young head"
Densely packed decimal ignored when decoding DPD groups with three large digits (marked as "x" in the last row of the table above), but are filled with zeros when encoding. The eight decimal values whose digits are all 8s or 9s have four codings each. The bits marked x in the table above are ignored on input, but will always be 0 in computed results. This table shows some representative decimal numbers and their encodings in BCD, Chen–Ho, and densely packed decimal (DPD): Densely packed decimal Densely packed decimal (DPD) is an efficient method for binary encoding decimal digits. The traditional system of