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 separator followed this convention when writing numbers such as in his influential work "Liber Abaci" in the 13th century. Tables of logarithms prepared by John Napier in 1614 and 1619 used the period (full stop) as the decimal separator, which was then adopted by Henry Briggs in his influential 17th century work. In France, the full stop was already in use in printing to make Roman numerals more readable, so the comma was chosen. Many other countries, such as Italy, also chose to use the comma to mark the decimal units position. It has been made standard by the ISO for