With the advent of network computing, a distributed program computation is a product of computations of single programs running on heterogeneous platforms, written in different programming languages, and exchanging messages. In this context, the need of a uniform abstract notation, machine and platform independent, to be used for the message exchange between communicating software entities, has given birth to ASN.1. This notation is a data type specification beyond the scope of any programming language. In the same context, the need of an environment to program distributed applications at a high level of abstraction with respect to communication protocols and operating systems architectures has led to the emergence of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). The core of CORBA is represented by the Interface Description Language (IDL). IDL is used to define objects which can be accessed via the Object Request Broker (ORB). Similar to the case of ASN.1, IDL has its own mechanisms to build complex data types, which can be mapped partially to those of ASN.1. Such a mapping makes the subject of this paper. It allows building applications that bridge the field of ASN.1 based communication protocols and that of CORBA based distributed applications.