IDL (Interface Description Language) is a softwareinterface description language (or interface descriptor language) created byWilliam Wulf and John Nestor ofCarnegie Mellon University in theUnited States, and David Lamb ofQueen's University inCanada.

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 usingremote procedure calls.

The Karlsruhe Ada compilation system used IDL resp.DIANA and its predecessorAIDA,^[1][2] and formarshalling the vanilla IDL External Representation.

BiiN'sDBMS used IDL as well, and for marshalling a more compact binary IDL External Representation.

• 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 Systems9:3:297-318 (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

• Specification languages

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