Editing Subnormal number (section)

== Terminology ==
In some older documents (especially standards documents such as the initial releases of [[IEEE 754-1985|IEEE 754]] and [[ISO_9899|the C language]]), "denormal" is used to refer exclusively to subnormal numbers. This usage persists in various standards documents, especially when discussing hardware that is incapable of representing any other denormalized numbers, but the discussion here uses the term "subnormal" in line with the 2008 revision of [[IEEE 754-2008|IEEE 754]]. In casual discussions the terms ''subnormal'' and ''denormal'' are often used interchangeably, in part because there are ''no'' denormalized IEEE binary numbers outside the subnormal range.

The term "number" is used rather loosely, to describe a particular sequence of digits, rather than a mathematical abstraction; see [[Floating-point arithmetic]] for details of how real numbers relate to floating-point representations. "Representation" rather than "number" may be used when clarity is required.