IDL (''Interface Description Language'') is a software
interface description language
interface description language or interface definition language (IDL), is a generic term for a language that lets a program or object written in one language communicate with another program written in an unknown language. IDLs describe an inter ...
(also referred to as Interface Descriptor Language) created by
William Wulf and John Nestor of
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
and David Lamb of
Queen's University, Canada.
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's DBMS used IDL as well, and for marshalling a more compact binary ''IDL External Representation''.
See also
*
DIANA (intermediate language), 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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