Decimal the Roman numerals did, an intermediate base of 5. Notably, the polymath Archimedes (ca. 287–212 BC) invented a decimal positional system in his Sand Reckoner which was based on 10 and later led the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss to lament what heights science would have already reached in his days if Archimedes had fully realized the potential of his ingenious discovery. The Hittites hieroglyphs (since 15th century BC), just like the Egyptian and early numerals in Greece, was strictly decimal. Some non-mathematical ancient texts like the Vedas dating back to 1900–1700 BCE make use of decimals and mathematical decimal
Binary integer 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. Using the fact that 2 = 1024 is only slightly more than 10 = 1000, 3"n"-digit decimal numbers can be efficiently packed into 10"n" binary bits. However, the IEEE formats have significands of 3"n"+1 digits, which would generally require 10"n"+4 binary bits to represent. This would not be efficient, because only 10 of