Decimal and, only the best mathematicians were able to multiply or divide large numbers. These difficulties were completely solved with the introduction of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system for representing integers. This system has been extended to represent some non-integer numbers, called "decimal fractions" or "decimal numbers" for forming the "decimal numeral system". For writing numbers, the decimal system uses ten decimal digits, a decimal mark, and, for negative numbers, a minus sign "−". The decimal digits are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; the decimal separator is the dot "" in many countries (including English speaking ones),
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