SourcePro : Currency Module User’s Guide : Decimal Classes : How Decimal Values Are Represented
How Decimal Values Are Represented
The Currency Module represents decimal values as a mantissa and an exponent. The mantissa stores all the digits in a number as an integer value, while the exponent is a second integer indicating the position of the number's decimal point. Since the mantissa may have too many digits to fit in any of the built-in integer types, two or more integers are used to store its value. The Currency Module uses the class RWMultiPrecisionInt<n>, where n is an integer template parameter that indicates the number of built-in integer types used to represent a number. The larger the value of n, the more digits a number can include.