That was my point, yes. Being unnormalized is a good thing. IEEE does the same thing for their decimals. > (In fairness, for small integers, the operators over

That was my point, yes. Being unnormalized is a good thing. IEEE does the same thing for their decimals. > (In fairness, for small integers, the operators over normalized values are closed — they always return normalized values) Normally normalization refers to using the smallest possible exponent; in this light small integers are unnormalized.