Gu Fan continued to explain, "So how exactly does a computer store decimals?
"This is what I previously mentioned as 'floating point numbers.' The term 'floating' means that the decimal point can move.
"For example, the binary number 1000.101 can be represented as 1.000101 x 2^3, which is somewhat similar to scientific notation in mathematics.
"In programs, to use scientific notation in binary and standardize it, we ensure that there is only one digit to the left of the decimal point and it must be 1. Most computers currently use floating-point numbers established by the IEEE international standard, which adopts the format of sign bit + exponent bit + mantissa.
"In short, due to the conversion between decimal and binary, computing in this way means that 0.1 + 0.2 does not equal a complete 0.3 because many decimals cannot be completely represented in binary in computers. Thus, they are stored as approximate values, and the sum of two approximate values is also an approximation.
