Interface description language

An interface description language (or alternately, interface definition language), or IDL for short, is a computer language used to describe a software component's interface. IDLs describe an interface in a language-neutral way, enabling communication between software components that do not share a language – for example, between components written in  C++ and components written in Java.
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(IDL) A language designed by Nestor, Lamb and Wulf of CMU in 1981 for describing the data structures passed between parts of an application, to provide a language-independent intermediate representation.
It forms part of Richard Snodgrass rts@cs.arizona.edu's Scorpion environment development system.
Not to be confused with any of the other IDLs.
Mailing list: info-idl@sei.cmu.edu.
["The Interface Description Language: Definition and Use," by Richard Snodgrass, Computer Science Press, 1989, ISBN 0-7167-8198-0].
[SIGPLAN Notices 22(11) (Nov 1987) special issue].
(1994-11-11)