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.