Binary integer decimal

The IEEE 754-2008 standard includes decimal floating-point number formats in which the significand and the exponent (and the payloads of NaNs) can be encoded in two ways, referred to as binary encoding and decimal encoding.

Both formats break a number down into a sign bit s, an exponent q (between qmin and qmax), and a p-digit significand c (between 0 and 10p−1). The value encoded is (−1)s×10q×c. In both formats the range of possible values is identical, but they differ in how the significand c is represented. In the decimal encoding, it is encoded as a series of p decimal digits (using the densely packed decimal (DPD) encoding), while in the binary integer decimal (BID) encoding, it is encoded as a binary number.

Format

Using the fact that 210 = 1024 is only slightly more than 103 = 1000, 3n-digit decimal numbers can be efficiently packed into 10n binary bits. However, the IEEE formats have significands of 3n+1 digits, which would generally require 10n+4 binary bits to represent.

This would not be efficient, because only 10 of the 16 possible values of the additional four bits are needed. A more efficient encoding can be designed using the fact that the exponent range is of the form 3×2k, so the exponent never starts with 11. Using the Decimal32 encoding (with a significand of 3*2+1 decimal digits) as an example (e stands for exponent, m for mantissa, i.e.