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Decimal floating point arithmetic refers to both a representation and operations on decimal floating point numbers. The key is preserving base 10 exponents wherever possible. The conversion to binary exponents can lead to repeat rounding errors and is therefore unsuitable for precision mathematics.
For more details on the rationale behind DFP, see Decimal Floating-Point: Algorithm for Computers in the Proceedings of the 16th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (Cowlishaw, M. F., 2003).
Implementations
IBM [POWER6], shipped in June 2007 includes DFP in hardware, as does the IBM System z9.
The IEEE Draft 754r defines this in more detail.
Microsoft C#, or .NET, uses System.Decimal.
Open Source radix 10000 Java class library on sourceforge.
In Linux, this is found in libdecnumber, gcc/dfp.c and other search terms.