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
Binary-coded decimal negative, and any other value is considered a positive sign value (the processors will normalize a positive sign to 1100 (C)). No matter how many bytes wide a word is, there are always an even number of nibbles because each byte has two of them. Therefore, a word of "n" bytes can contain up to (2"n")−1 decimal digits, which is always an odd number of digits. A decimal number with "d" digits requires ("d"+1) bytes of storage space. For example, a 4-byte (32-bit) word can hold seven decimal digits plus a sign, and can represent values ranging from ±9,999,999. Thus