> Decimal floating point would hardly affect accuracy compared to binary floating point
The larger the radix, the more of the mantissa is wasted. Given fixed storage, base 2 floats will have higher precision over their range than higher bases, like 10 and 16.
The difference is easy to illustrate with base 16 and base 2, since we can convert between the two easily. Converting a base 16 float to base 2 will result in leading zeroes some of the time, which could have been used for storing data. The same is true with base 10, but you have to do more math to demonstrate it.
The larger the radix, the more of the mantissa is wasted. Given fixed storage, base 2 floats will have higher precision over their range than higher bases, like 10 and 16.
The difference is easy to illustrate with base 16 and base 2, since we can convert between the two easily. Converting a base 16 float to base 2 will result in leading zeroes some of the time, which could have been used for storing data. The same is true with base 10, but you have to do more math to demonstrate it.