IEEE represents 3 special values +inf, -inf, and NaN which are determined "specially" by the bit fields s, e, and f.

0 and extremely small IEEE floating point numbers are represented as denormalized values.

All other floating point values are represented as normalized values.

Denormalized
s	00000000	f

Normalized
s	0<e<255	f

Infinity
s	11111111	00000000000000........00

NaN
s	11111111	f not all 0's