Different cultures use different symbols for the decimal mark.

The choice of symbol for the decimal mark also affects the choice of symbol for the thousands separator used in digit grouping, so the latter is also treated in this article.

In mathematics the decimal mark is a type of radix point, a term that also applies to number systems with bases other than ten.

Many other countries also chose to use the comma to mark the decimal units position, such as Italy.

), which is called a " stop " or " full stop " in other countries, was used as the standard decimal mark.

In the nations of the British Empire, although the full stop could be used in typewritten material, the point ( mid dot: ·), which can also be called an interpunct ( often referred to as the decimal point ) was preferred for the decimal mark in printing technologies that could accommodate it.

However, as the mid dot was already in common use in the mathematics world to indicate multiplication, the SI rejected its use as the decimal mark.

However, the use of the full stop as decimal mark was not banned.

When South Africa adopted the metric system, it adopted the comma as its decimal mark, although a number of house styles, including leading newspapers like The Star and The Sunday Times continue to use the decimal point.

Interlingua has used the comma as its decimal mark since the publication of the Interlingua Grammar in 1951.

Esperanto also uses the comma as its official decimal mark, while thousands are separated by non-breaking spaces: 12 345 678, 9.

The 1931 grammar of Volapük by Arie de Jong uses the comma as its decimal mark, and ( somewhat unusually ) uses the middle dot as the thousands separator ( 12 · 345 · 678, 90123 ).

In 1958, disputes between European and American delegates over the correct representation of the decimal mark nearly stalled the development of the ALGOL computer programming language.

For ease of reading, numbers with many digits before or after the decimal mark may be divided into groups using a delimiter, with the counting of groups starting from the decimal mark in both directions.

As with the decimal mark, there have been several common conventions for which character to use for the digit group separator.

If the decimal mark is a point, the digit group separator is often a comma or a space.

If the decimal mark is a comma, the digit group separator is often a point or a space.

The problem with the point and the comma as either decimal mark or digit group separator is that, internationally, they have both often been used for both meanings, and their meaning is context-dependent ( one must know which notational system is being used in order to interpret them ).

Another possible source of the suanpan is Chinese counting rods, which operated with a decimal system but lacked the concept of zero as a place holder.

The 1 / 4 abacus, which is suited to decimal calculation, appeared circa 1930, and became widespread as the Japanese abandoned hexadecimal weight calculation which was still common in China.

There was to be a store ( that is, a memory ) capable of holding 1, 000 numbers of 40 decimal digits each ( ca.

The numeral system employed, known as algorism, is positional decimal notation.

Astronomical year numbering is based on AD / CE year numbering, but follows normal decimal integer numbering more strictly.

For example A ( 4, 2 ) is an integer of 19, 729 decimal digits.

For m ≥ 4, however, it grows much more quickly ; even A ( 4, 2 ) is about 2, and the decimal expansion of A ( 4, 3 ) is very large by any typical measure.

While the numerical difference between the decimal and binary interpretations is relatively small for the prefixes kilo and mega, it grows to over 20 % for prefix yotta, illustrated in the linear-log graph ( at right ) of difference versus storage size.

In computing and electronic systems, binary-coded decimal ( BCD ) is a class of binary encodings of decimal numbers where each decimal digit is represented by a fixed number of bits, usually four or eight, although other sizes ( such as six bits ) have been used historically.

BCD's main virtue is a more accurate representation and rounding of decimal quantities as well as an ease of conversion into human-readable representations.

Although BCD is not as widely used as in the past, decimal fixed-point and floating-point formats are still important and continue to be used in financial, commercial, and industrial computing, where subtle conversion and rounding errors that are inherent to floating point binary representations cannot be tolerated.

In contrast with " binary prefix ", this usage is referred to as a " decimal prefix ", as 1000 is a power of 10.

Industry practice, more thoroughly documented at Timeline of binary prefixes and continuing today, is to specify hard drives using SI prefixes and symbols in their SI or " decimal " interpretation.

Numeric character references can be in decimal format,, where is a variable number of decimal digits.

Mauritania and Madagascar are the only remaining countries that do not use the decimal system ; instead, the Mauritanian ouguiya is divided into 5 khoums, while the Malagasy ariary is divided into 5 iraimbilanja.

The customary acceptance of the fact that any real number x has a decimal expansion is an implicit acknowledgment that a particular Cauchy sequence of rational numbers ( whose terms are the successive truncations of the decimal expansion of x ) has the real limit x.

These digits are often used with a decimal separator which indicates the start of a fractional part, and with a symbol such as the plus sign + ( for positive ) or minus sign − ( for negative ) adjacent to the numeral to indicate whether it is greater or less than zero, respectively.

It can be seen as the context that allows the symbols " 11 " to be interpreted as the binary symbol for three, the decimal symbol for eleven, or a symbol for other numbers in different bases.

The European notation avoids using a decimal separator, and replaces the decimal separator with the SI prefix symbol for the particular value.

The use of a SI prefix symbol or the letter ' R ' circumvents the problem that decimal separators tend to ' disappear ' when photocopying a printed circuit diagram.

* In HTML, the graphical symbol for congruence ≅ is written as ( hexadecimal ), ( decimal ) and ( named entity ).

Square kilometre, symbol km < sup > 2 </ sup >, is a decimal multiple of the SI unit of surface area, the square metre, one of the SI derived units.

The 22nd General Conference on Weights and Measures declared in 2003 that " the symbol for the decimal marker shall be either the point on the line or the comma on the line ".

" as decimal symbol.

For other values the SI style 1 234 567, 89 is used with a "," as decimal symbol.

In finance, the currency symbol is used as a decimal separator or put after the number.

However, notice in the first example above how the " times " symbol resembles the letter ' x ' and also how the '·' symbol resembles a decimal point, so to avoid confusion it's best to use one of the later two forms.

When this is not the case, as in astronomy or for latitudes and longitudes on the Earth, degree measurements may be written with decimal places like 40. 1875 ° with the degree symbol behind the decimals.

The symbols are the decimal symbol, always capitalised, followed by the letter " i ".

Pitiscus is sometimes credited with inventing the decimal point, the symbol separating integers from decimal fractions, which appears in his trigonometrical tables and was subsequently accepted by John Napier in his logarithmic papers ( 1614 and 1619 ).