Programming Comments

It is good practice to include lots of comments in your code so that when you or someone else comes back and looks at the code you/they will understand what it is meant to do.

A comment will be ignored by the compiler, this means that anything in between the comment tags will not become a program. (Makes any scene?)

Normally there are two ways to write comments, one is a single line, and one is a multi line comment. There names explain what they mean.

So in Java and C++, a single line comment will look like this:

// Comment Text

And a multi line comment will look like this:

/*
More than one line
See!*/

In python a singe line comment is done like is:

# Comment text

And a multi lined comment will go like this:

" " " 
this is a multi line comment
which spans many lines
" " "

As you can see Java and C++ have the same way of creating comments but Python has a different way just to let you know that all languages do not have the same way of commenting text.

Useful Python Commenting Information

And for a small side note here is how to write comments in HTML.

HTML

<!-- Comment text in here -->

Hope this helps, Pete

9 Dec 2007