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The gain in range and precision by the 'combination encoding' evolves because the taken 2 bits from the exponent only use three of four possible states, and the 4 MSBs of the significand stay within 0000 … 1001 (10 of 16 possible states). In total that is {{math|1=3 × 10 = 30}} possible values when combined in one encoding, which is representable in 5 instead of 6 bits ({{tmath|1=2^5=32}}).
The decimalxxx formats include denormal values, for a graceful degradation of precision near zero, but in contrast to the binaryxxx formats they are not marked / do not need a special exponent, in decimal64 they are just values too small to have full 16 digit precision even with the smallest exponent.
In the cases of Infinity and NaN, all other bits of the encoding are ignored. Thus, it is possible to initialize an array to Infinities or NaNs by filling it with a single byte value.
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