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 but may be a comma "" in other countries (mainly in Europe). For representing a nonnegative number, a decimal consists of It is generally assumed that, if , the first digit is not zero, but, in some circumstances, it may be useful to have one or more 0's on the left. This does not change the value represented by the decimal. For example, . Similarly, if , it may be removed, and conversely, trailing zeros may be added without changing the represented number. For example, and . sometimes, the unnecessary zeros are used for indicating the accuracy of a measurement.