| The libgcobol is intended for use entirely and solely by executables created | |
| from COBOL source code by the GCOBOL "COBOL for GCC" front end. | |
| libgcobol.a can be staticly linked in, but it makes for very large binaries. We | |
| tend to use that for debugging the GCOBOL compiler, and not much else | |
| Many of the functions in the library are called by the executable code generated | |
| by the GCOBOL compiler through GIMPLE tags, and thus prototypes -- which are | |
| part of the C/C++ programming paradigm -- are not used. Both the calling | |
| program and the called program use the extern "C" construction so that the | |
| linker can find the functions, and they need to agree ahead of time about the | |
| meaning of passed parameters. |