### 1.4 GNU Fortran and G77

The GNU Fortran compiler is the successor to `g77`, the Fortran 77 front end included in GCC prior to version 4. It is an entirely new program that has been designed to provide Fortran 95 support and extensibility for future Fortran language standards, as well as providing backwards compatibility for Fortran 77 and nearly all of the GNU language extensions supported by `g77`.