From the Wikipedia page on the IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic,The possible finite values that can be represented in a format are determined by the base (b), the number of digits in the significand (precision, p), and the exponent (q) parameter emax:...q must be an integer such that 1emax  q+p1  emax (e.g., if p=7 and emax=96 then q is 101 through 90).I can't figure out the reasoning behind the above inequality. I would've thought (in my simplicity) that it would be -emax  q  emax or something similar. What am I missing?
Floating point format: why must `1emax  q+p1  emax`?
floating point;number formats