>Which makes it look like the words are stored in BE and the bytes in each word
>is stored LE.  

For whatever reason, the ARM hardware FP units did things this way.

There is specific support in GCC/GDB to recognize this format as distinct
from "pure" big or little endian IEEE.

>Can anyone verify that this is the case.  And if so, is it something that
>should be "fixed" so it looks like IEEE double precision?

I believe that the actual IEEE standard only specifies the bit pattern that
is to be used, leaving the actual storage order as "implementation dependent".

While annoying, it is within ARM's perogatives to use an incompatible format.

When we did ARM support in VxWorks last year, we ran into the same complaints.
I wrote the tech note.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com