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
Decimal floating point The following example is decimal, which simply means the base is 10. This is nothing other than converting to scientific notation. In detail: This is the true result, the exact sum of the operands. It will be rounded to 7 digits and then normalized if necessary. The final result is: Note that the low 3 digits of the second operand (654) are essentially lost. This is round-off error. In extreme cases, the sum of two non-zero numbers may be equal to one of them: Another problem of loss of significance occurs when two close numbers are subtracted. e=5; s=1.234571 and