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
Decimal floating point example, a significand of is encoded as binary , with the leading 4 bits encoding 7; the first significand which requires a 24th bit (and thus the second encoding form) is 2 = . In the above cases, the value represented is: Decimal64 and Decimal128 operate analogously, but with larger exponent continuation and significand fields. For Decimal128, the second encoding form is actually never used; the largest valid significand of 10−1 = 1ED09BEAD87C0378D8E63FFFFFFFF can be represented in 113 bits. In this version, the significand is stored as a series of decimal digits. The leading digit is between 0 and 9