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From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: IEEE floating point format
Message-ID: <10644@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 1 Aug 89 21:27:21 GMT
References: <2170002@hpldsla.HP.COM> <9697@alice.UUCP> <3554@buengc.BU.EDU>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 10

In article <3554@buengc.BU.EDU> bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton) writes:
>Fascinating; but, what does it mean to say "denormalized" in this context?

Numbers sufficiently near zero can have an exponent smaller than is
representable, but if you're willing to lose some bits of precision,
you can sometimes represent them as having the smallest possible
exponent and most-significant bit of the significand (aka "mantissa")
0, instead of 1 as it usually would be.  Such a representation is
called "denormalized" (normalized numbers are either exactly 0 or
their MSB is 1).