Decimal floating point (3 or 4 binary bits), and the rest of the significand uses the densely packed decimal (DPD) encoding. Unlike the binary integer significand version, where the exponent changed position and came before the significand, this encoding combines the leading 2 bits of the exponent and the leading digit (3 or 4 bits) of the significand into the five bits that follow the sign bit. This is followed by a fixed-offset exponent continuation field. Finally, the significand continuation field made of 2, 5, or 11 10-bit "declets", each encoding 3 decimal digits. If the first two bits after the sign bit
Dot-decimal notation table in RFC 790 ("Assigned Numbers") used the dotted decimal format, zero-padding each number to three digits. RFC 1123 ("Requirements for Internet Hosts – Application and Support") from October 1989 mentions a requirement on host software to accept “IP address in dotted-decimal ("#.#.#.#") form”, although it notes “[t]his last requirement is not intended to specify the complete syntactic form for entering a dotted-decimal host number”. A separate IETF draft to define textual representation of IP addresses expired. A popular implementation of IP networking, originating in 4.2BSD, contains a function "inet_aton()" for converting IP addresses in character string representation to internal