Decimal the Roman numerals did, an intermediate base of 5. Notably, the polymath Archimedes (ca. 287–212 BC) invented a decimal positional system in his Sand Reckoner which was based on 10 and later led the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss to lament what heights science would have already reached in his days if Archimedes had fully realized the potential of his ingenious discovery. The Hittites hieroglyphs (since 15th century BC), just like the Egyptian and early numerals in Greece, was strictly decimal. Some non-mathematical ancient texts like the Vedas dating back to 1900–1700 BCE make use of decimals and mathematical decimal
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