IDL: sharing intermediate representations

IDL (Interface Description Language) is a practical and useful tool for controlling the exchange of structured data between different components of a large system. IDL is a notation for describing collections of programs and the data structures through which they communicate. Using IDL, a designer gives abstract descriptions of data structures, together with representation specifications that specialize the abstract structures for particular programs. A tool, the IDL translator, generates readers and writers that map between concrete internal representations and abstract exchange representations.