Not everything in the world is a whole number. For that, we have numbers with fractions or decimal numbers. Decimal numbers are used most naturally for measuring things.
A real number is of the following form:
significand x 10exponent
Here, both the significand and the exponent are signed integers. The size of each depends upon the number of bytes for a given real number type. There are no unsigned components. This provides a very large range of numbers, from positive to negative as well as very small fractional values:
Type | # of Bytes |
float | 4 |
double | 8 |
long double ... |