(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)

An 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 interface in a language-independent way, enabling communication between software components that do not share one language, for example, between those written in C++ and those written in Java.

(IDL) 1. An OSF standard for defining RPC stubs. [Details?] 2. Part of an effort by Project DOE at SunSoft, Inc. to integrate distributed object technology into the Solaris operating system. IDL provides the standard interface between objects, and is the base mechanism for object interaction. The Object Management Group's CORBA 1.1 (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) specifies the interface between objects. IDL (Interface Definition Language) is the base mechanism for object interaction. The SunSoft OMG IDL CFE (Compiler Front End) version 1.2 provides a complete framework for building CORBA 1.1-compliant preprocessors for OMG IDL. To use it you write a back-end. A complete compiler of IDL would translate IDL into client side and server side routines for remote communication in the same manner as Sun's current RPCL compiler. The IDL compiler front end allows integration of new back ends which can translate IDL to various programming languages. Several companies including Sunsoft are building back ends to the CFE which translate IDL into target languages, e.g. Pascal or C++, in the context of planned CORBA-compliant products. IDL requires C++ 2.1. Not to be confused with any of the other IDLs. E-mail: <idl-cfe@sun.com>. ftp://omg.org/pub/omg_idl_cfe.tar.Z, ftp://omg.org/pub/OMG_IDL_CFE_1.2/. Telephone: Mache Creeger, SunSoft, Inc. +1 (415) 336 5884. (1993-05-04)