An unfortunate reality of trying to represent continuous real numbers in a fixed space (e.g. with a limited number of bits) is that this comes with an inevitable loss of both precision and accuracy.

Editor's Note: This is the first article in a two-part series on decimal representations and decimal arithmetic in general, and on Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) in particular. In this first installment, ...

Many numerical applications typically use floating-point types to compute values. However, in some platforms, a floating-point unit may not be available. Other platforms may have a floating-point unit ...