Editing IDL specification language

{{Short description|Software interface description language}}
{{Distinguish|IDL (programming language)}}
'''IDL''' ('''Interface Description Language''') is a software [[interface description language]] (or interface descriptor language) created by [[William Wulf]] and John Nestor of [[Carnegie Mellon University]] in the [[United States]], and David Lamb of [[Queen's University at Kingston|Queen's University]] in [[Canada]].

==History==
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 (intermediate language)|DIANA]] and its predecessor [[AIDA (intermediate language)|AIDA]],<ref>{{cite book |last1=Goos |first1=Gerhard |last2=Wulf |first2=William A. |last3=Evans |first3=Arthur |last4=Butler |first4=Kenneth J. |date=2000 |title=DIANA: an intermediate language for Ada |series=Lecture Notes In Computer Science |volume=161 |publisher=springer |isbn=0-387-12695-3 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/dianaintermediat0000unse }}</ref><ref>{{cite conference |url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=948632.948639 |title=Towards a compiler front-end for Ada |last1=Goos |first1=Gerhard | last2=Winterstein | first2=Georg
 |year=1980 |conference=Annual International Conference on Ada |book-title=Proceedings of the ACM-SIGPLAN symposium on Ada programming language |publisher=ACM-SIGPLAN |pages=36–46 |access-date=2016-02-10 }}</ref> and for [[Marshalling (computer science)|marshalling]] the vanilla IDL External Representation.

[[BiiN]]'s [[DBMS]] used IDL as well, and for marshalling a more compact binary IDL External Representation.

==Notes==
{{Reflist}}

==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 T. Snodgrass|Richard Snodgrass]], ''The Interface Description Language: Definition and Use'', W.H. Freeman, 1989
* J Nestor, William Allan. Wulf, David Alex Lamb, ''[https://kilthub.figshare.com/articles/IDL_Interface_Description_Language/6606263 IDL, Interface Description Language]'', Technical Report, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1981

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[[Category:Specification languages]]