I know it might be a noob question but since it’s not covered in the e-book I’m studying I’m gonna ask it. In IEEE standard binary floating-point format actually representing numbers by scientific notation I know that an integer value of one is always assumed to be added to the fractional part illustrated by the significand part of the binary and is not included in the binary, So what confuses me is how to How to distinguish between 1 and zero floating-point values because I assume both have a totally zero significand and I guess the differentiation here should be done by exponent part but don’t know how!
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For the zeroes (there are two, a positive and a negative zero that differ in the sign bit but must be considered equal), the significand and the exponent are all 0-bits, whereas for non-zero values at least one of them has a 1-bit (for a value of 1, the exponent is all 1-bits except for the most significant one).
The Wikipedia article on the IEEE 754 standard lists the exact bit patterns.