Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!dptg!rutgers!apple!bionet!ig!arizona!rts
From: rts@arizona.edu (Rick Snodgrass)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: IDL and XDR
Message-ID: <14157@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 21 Sep 89 16:32:45 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 25

IDL *can* handle graphs with cycles. Additionally, it has both an
ASCII external representation and various binary representations that
are more efficient (Lamb's TOPLAS paper is a good place to start on
this topic). Finally, programs using IDL can talk to other programs
through XDR; this process is described in Sundar Varadarajan's MS
thesis:

@techreport     ( VARADARAJAN88B,
key     =       "Varadarajan" ,
author  =       "Varadarajan, S." ,
title   =       "Using IDL in a Heterogeneous Environment" ,
type    =       "SoftLab Document" ,
number  =       "35" ,
institution=    "unccsd" ,
address =       "Chapel Hill, NC" ,
year    =       "1988" ,
month   =       "aug" ,
pages   =       "1-88"
)

also available as a tech report from the SoftLab project of the
University of North Carolina (you can mail requests to payne@cs.unc.edu).

Incidently, this thesis also describes how programs using IDL and
the Cornell Program Synthesizer can communicate.