DECIMAL Field

A decimal field is used to represent a floating point number as exponent and mantissa. The exponent is a signed 8 bit integer used to express precision and the mantissa is a signed 32 bit integer used to express the value. The numerical value is obtained by multiplying the mantissa with the base-10 power of the exponent expressed as: number = mantissa * 10^exp. The exponent and mantissa is decoded as a single, composite field.

Decimal fields are 5 bytes in length. The first byte is the exponent, and the remaining 4 bytes are the mantissa. For example, the number 0.90 is encoded as FE0000005A.

FE (exponent) == -2, 0000005A (mantissa) == 90, value == 90 * 10^-2 == 90 * 0.01 == 0.90