Comment by arh68

Also, there's actually a much more relevant section later on in the spec (just got to p18):

   For constrained
   applications, where there is a choice between representing a specific
   number as an integer and as a decimal fraction or bigfloat (such as
   when the exponent is small and non-negative), there is a quality-of-
   implementation expectation that the integer representation is used
   directly.