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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.
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".
As an illustration, the decimal quantity 12.345 can be expressed with various numbers of significant figures or decimal places. If insufficient precision is available then the number is rounded in some manner to fit the available precision. The following table shows the results for various total precision at two rounding ways (N/A stands for ...
Any such symbol can be called a decimal mark, decimal marker, or decimal sign. Symbol-specific names are also used; decimal point and decimal comma refer to a dot (either baseline or middle ) and comma respectively, when it is used as a decimal separator; these are the usual terms used in English, [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] with the aforementioned ...
For example, "11" represents the number eleven in the decimal or base-10 numeral system (today, the most common system globally), the number three in the binary or base-2 numeral system (used in modern computers), and the number two in the unary numeral system (used in tallying scores). The number the numeral represents is called its value.
Decimal numbers, while arguably more useful to work with when performing calculations, sometimes lack the precision that common fractions have. Sometimes an infinite repeating decimal is required to reach the same precision. Thus, it is often useful to convert repeating decimals into fractions.