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From: pdbain@wateng.UUCP (Peter Bain)
Newsgroups: net.micro.68k,net.arch
Subject: binary normalization
Message-ID: <1422@wateng.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Sep-84 10:36:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: wateng.1422
Posted: Wed Sep 12 10:36:29 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Sep-84 05:28:34 EDT
References: <1191@rti-sel.UUCP>, <4190@fortune.UUCP>, <420@watdcsu.UUCP>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 9

The IEEE floating point standard also uses binary normalization.
One benefit of this is that, since you know the first bit of the mantissa
will be a 1, you can leave it out, giving an extra bit of precision.
The standard uses special exponent values to express exceptional conditions
such as zero, unnormalized numbers (this allows "soft underflow"),
not-a-number, overflow, etc. I compared 32 bit IEEE to 32 bit IBM, and found
that IEEE is better in the average and worst case, and as good in the
average case.
	-peter