There is a time when normalization is undesirable. Suppose you get 0.06000 x 10^-50 as the result of your computation, and -50 is the smallest exponent you can store. Indeed, in our excess-50 notation that we used earlier in this chapter, the value would be 00600000 which is +0.06000×10⁰⁰. If we tried to normalize this by shifting the mantissa left and subtracting 1 from the exponent, we would get overflow. Yet 0.06000×10^-50 is a valid real number, and can be stored by our floating point system, just not in normalized form.