By filling the underflow gap like this, significant digits are lost, but not as abruptly as when using the flush to zero on underflow approach (discarding all significant digits when underflow is reached). Hence the production of a subnormal number is sometimes called gradual underflow because it allows a calculation to lose precision slowly when the result is small.
By filling the underflow gap like this, significant digits are lost, but not as abruptly as when using the flush to zero on underflow approach (discarding all significant digits when underflow is reached) Hence the production of a subnormal number is sometimes called gradual underflow because it allows a calculation to lose precision slowly when the result is small.