Programmers can thus present data types and values to users in a format they are familiar with.
However, it should be noted that the IDL parser is not perfect. While IDL has many data types, not all expressions are representable as a textual string. For example, the value of pointers cannot be printed. Briefly, IDL surreptitiously discards trailing dimensions of size one. Thus, in doing any heavy duty work with structures you will find that you lose some crucial dimensions, which you can't normally regain.