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by zozbot234 2242 days ago
I believe that this "window and offset" intuition, while indeed true and useful in the radix-2 ("binary") case, does not cleanly extend to the general case where no hidden bit is used even for non-"subnormal" numbers, and some numbers may thus have multiple representations. This shows up perhaps most clearly in the case of decimal floating point, but ISTR that a non-2 radix was also used in some mainframes.
1 comments

Subnormal numbers are a blemish on the otherwise beautiful IEEE 754 specification :(