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Decimals may sometimes be identified by a decimal separator (usually "." or "," as in 25.9703 or 3,1415). [3] Decimal may also refer specifically to the digits after the decimal separator, such as in "3.14 is the approximation of π to two decimals". Zero-digits after a decimal separator serve the purpose of signifying the precision of a value.
For example, decimal 365 (10) or senary 1 405 (6) corresponds to binary 1 0110 1101 (2) (nine bits) and to ternary 111 112 (3) (six digits). However, they are still far less compact than the corresponding representations in bases such as decimal – see below for a compact way to codify ternary using nonary (base 9) and septemvigesimal (base 27).
The positional decimal system is presently universally used in human writing. The base 1000 is also used (albeit not universally), by grouping the digits and considering a sequence of three decimal digits as a single digit. This is the meaning of the common notation 1,000,234,567 used for very large numbers.
99.3 is "ninety-nine point three"; or "ninety-nine and three tenths" (U.S., occasionally). In English the decimal point was originally printed in the center of the line (0·002), but with the advent of the typewriter it was placed at the bottom of the line, so that a single key could be used as a full stop/period and as a decimal point.
Every terminating decimal representation can be written as a decimal fraction, a fraction whose denominator is a power of 10 (e.g. 1.585 = 1585 / 1000 ); it may also be written as a ratio of the form k / 2 n ·5 m (e.g. 1.585 = 317 / 2 3 ·5 2 ).
The decimal numeral system uses a decimal separator, commonly a period in English, or a comma in other European languages, [2] to denote the "ones place" or "units place", [3] [4] [5] which has a place value one.
In the decimal system, each place is a power of ten. For example: ... 3, 5: 1/36 1/31 31: 0. 032258064516129: 0. 02041: 37: 1/37 1/32 2: 0.03125: 0.02: 2: 1/40 ...
Also the converse is true: The decimal expansion of a rational number is either finite, or endlessly repeating. Finite decimal representations can also be seen as a special case of infinite repeating decimal representations. For example, 36 ⁄ 25 = 1.44 = 1.4400000...; the endlessly repeated sequence is the one-digit sequence "0".