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
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