Beauty and the Beast or A Formal Semantic Description of the ControlConstructs of Cobol and its Implementation
Peter Baumann, Juerg Faessler, Markus Kiser, Zafer Oeztuerk · 1993
We present a formal semantical analysis of the central control constructs of Cobol. In this paper we provide the denotational semantics of a language we call MiCo 1 containing the essential control constructs of Cobol. MiCo can therefore be regarded as a core language of Cobol. The semantics we have developed has been implemented in the functional programming language Standard ML, thereby resulting in an interpreter for MiCo. It can easily be adapted to formal semantics of essential parts of different Cobol dialects. 1 Introduction In this paper we provide a formal semantical analysis of the central control constructs of Cobol. The theoretical framework we use is denotational semantics. We are mainly interested in modelling the meaning of the essential control constructs such as gotostatements, perform-statements, paragraphs, etc. There is already a considerable literature on denotational semantics (see e.g. [5, 8]), but to the best of our knowledge no such formal analysis of the c...