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binary-coded decimal
Last modified: Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Abbreviated as BCD, binary-coded decimal
is a format for representing decimal numbers (integers) in which each digit is represented by four bits (a nibble ). For example, the number 375 would be represented as:
0011 0111 0101
One advantage of BCD over binary representations is that there is no limit to the size of a number. To add another digit, you just need to add a new 4-bit sequence. In contrast, numbers represented in binary format are generally limited to the largest number that can be represented by 8, 16, 32 or 64 bits.
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