it allows the format to have an extra bit of precision. A normal number's exponent has a "bias" added to it, and the resulting biased exponent is always a positive integer. Numbers smaller than 2 are called subnormal numbers. These numbers are represented by the biased exponent 0, which stands for emin. For subnormal numbers, there is no longer an implicit leading 1 bit, and the significand lies between 0 and 1.

Due to the possibility of multiple encodings (at least in formats called interchange