title: Intuitive explanation for range of representable values
body: <p>I'm a newbie and have recently started to read an introduction to floating-point number representations, which stated that the range of representable values in an arbitrary base b, for a minimum exponent value L and maximum exponent value U, can be found as follows:</p>
  <ul>
  <li>minimal value: b^(L-1)</li>
  <li>maximum value: b^U * (1-b^-t), where t is the number of significant digits in the mantissa</li>
  </ul>
  <p>How should these be understood and/or derived, explained for a newbie?</p>