> Yeah,
> 
> I don't think IEEE dictates the order. ARM ended up with little endian
> byte order and big endian double word order (relative to others). I
> don't know what the history behind this is.
> 
It's best to consider it as the bit order of two words, the bit-order 
within the words is the same as Intel, but the word order is the same as 
Motorola.  If you run an ARM in big-endian mode, then the word order stays 
the same, but the bit order is effectively reversed (ie, it becomes 
identical to the Motorala format).

As for the reasons, when I asked one of the designers, I was told the 
implementation was more efficient when you needed to write an emulator.

You can get full details in the fpa-11 data sheet (available from our web 
page).

Richard.