IDL (''Interface Description Language'') is a software
interface description language (also referred to as Interface Descriptor Language) created by
William Wulf
William Allan Wulf (born December 8, 1939) is a computer scientist notable for his work in programming languages and compilers. Until June 2012, he was a university professor and the AT&T Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the Depart ...
and John Nestor of
Carnegie Mellon University and David Lamb of
Queen's University, Canada
Queen's University at Kingston, commonly known as Queen's University or simply Queen's, is a public research university in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Queen's holds more than of land throughout Ontario and owns Herstmonceux Castle in East Sus ...
.
Like other interface description languages, IDL defined interfaces in a language- and machine- independent way, allowing the specification of interfaces between components written in different languages, and possibly executing on different machines using
remote procedure calls.
The Karlsruhe Ada compilation system used IDL resp. DIANA and its predecessor AIDA,
and for
marshalling the vanilla ''IDL External Representation''.
BiiN
BiiN was a company created out of a joint research project by Intel and Siemens to develop fault tolerant high-performance multi-processor computers build on custom microprocessor designs. BiiN was an outgrowth of the Intel iAPX 432 multiprocesso ...
's DBMS used IDL as well, and for marshalling a more compact binary ''IDL External Representation''.
See also
*
DIANA (intermediate language)
DIANA, the Descriptive Intermediate Attributed Notation for Ada, is an intermediate language used to represent the semantics of an Ada program. It was originally designed as an interface between the front end (syntactic analysis) and middle (sema ...
, an application of IDL
References
* David Alex Lamb, ''Sharing intermediate representations: the interface description language'', Ph.D. Dissertation, Carnegie-Mellon University, Department of Computer Science, 1983
* David Alex Lamb, "IDL: sharing intermediate representations", ''ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems'' 9:3:297-318 (July 1987)
* John Nestor, Joseph M. Newcomer, Paola Gianinni, and Donald Stone, ''IDL: The language and its Implementation'', Prentice-Hall, 1990.
*
Richard Snodgrass, ''The Interface Description Language: Definition and Use'', W.H. Freeman, 1989
* J Nestor, William Allan. Wulf, David Alex Lamb,
IDL, Interface Description Language', Technical Report, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1981
Notes
Specification languages
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