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 example, a significand of is encoded as binary , with the leading 4 bits encoding 7; the first significand which requires a 24th bit (and thus the second encoding form) is 2 = . In the above cases, the value represented is: Decimal64 and Decimal128 operate analogously, but with larger exponent continuation and significand fields. For Decimal128, the second encoding form is actually never used; the largest valid significand of 10−1 = 1ED09BEAD87C0378D8E63FFFFFFFF can be represented in 113 bits. In this version, the significand is stored as a series of decimal digits. The leading digit is between 0 and 9