Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!qucis!dalamb
From: dalamb@qucis.queensu.CA (David Lamb)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: How Do Interface Description Languages Work?
Message-ID: <223@qusuntrc.queensu.CA>
Date: 13 Sep 89 18:21:53 GMT
References: <22096@cup.portal.com>
Reply-To: dalamb@qucis.queensu.CA (David Lamb)
Organization: Queen's University, Kingston Ontario
Lines: 30

In article <22096@cup.portal.com> Will@cup.portal.com (Will E Estes) writes:
>1) what is it about the IDL language that makes it better suited to
>dealing with C data structures than C itself?
	- IDL supports multiple inheritance as in object-oriented languages.
	  It can coordinate the definitions of structs corresponding to
	  subclasses so that fields are in "the same place"
	- An IDL processor can generate runtime descriptors that let you
	  apply generic tools to manipulate your data structures. e.g
	  automatically write out the contents of a graph.
>
>2) can someone quantify what kind of performance benefits can be
>expected using IDL over using just C?
	- I don't understand what performance you mean.  To my knowledge
	  no one has yet studied productivity improvements; it's all
	  anecdotal.
>
>I have had several sources suggest some good books on this topic, and
	- try "Sharing Intermediate Representations: The Interface
	  Description Language", ACM Trans. Prog. Lang and Systems, July 1987
	  for a somewhat longer introduction.

David Alex Lamb
Department of Computing and Information Science
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6
(613) 545-6067

ARPA Internet:	David.Lamb@cs.cmu.edu
		dalamb@qucis.queensu.ca
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