The mantissa is stored as Integer. I think that is the only way to keep all digits. But with that representation it is certainly not sensible to normalize to the most significant digit. A reasonable normalization might be to divide the mantissa by a power of 10 such that the mantissa is not a multiple of 10.
On Wed, 27 Nov 2013, Carter Schonwald wrote:
I'm looking at the scientific package, and I thought to myself "huh, it doesn't seem to normalize the
numbers to scientific notation"
it has the right semantics for how printing and operations *mean*, but it doesn't seem to internally keep
them as "normalized" floats.