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 integer decimal encoding, it is encoded as a series of "p" decimal digits (using the densely packed decimal (DPD) encoding). This makes conversion to decimal form efficient, but requires a specialized decimal ALU to process. In the binary integer decimal (BID) encoding, it is encoded as a binary number. Using the fact that 2 = 1024 is only slightly more than 10 = 1000, 3"n"-digit decimal numbers can be efficiently packed into 10"n" binary bits. However, the IEEE formats have significands of 3"n"+1 digits, which would generally require 10"n"+4 binary bits to represent. This would not be efficient, because only 10 of