Decimal numbers that may be expressed as a fraction, the denominator of which is a power of ten. For example, the numerals formula_5 represent the fractions , , . More generally, a decimal with digits after the separator represents the fraction with denominator , whose numerator is the integer obtained by removing the separator. Expressed as a fully reduced fraction, the decimal numbers are those, whose denominator is a product of a power of 2 by a power of 5. Thus the smallest denominators of decimal numbers are The "integer part", or "integral part" of a decimal is the integer written
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