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13 views2 pages

Comments

Uploaded by

Noelia Quintela
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Inside a Java program, you can write a special text that will be ignored by the Java compiler — known as
the comment. Comments allow you to exclude code from the compilation process (disable it) or clarify a
piece of code to yourself or other developers. In our materials, we use comments in the theory and
practice lessons to explain how and why our code works.

The Java programming language supports three kinds of comments.

End-of-line comments
The Java compiler ignores any text from // to the end of the line.

class Program {
public static void main(String[] args) {
// The line below will be ignored
// System.out.println("Hello, World");
// It prints the string "Hello, Java"
System.out.println("Hello, Java"); // Here can be any comment
}
}

In the example above the text after // is ignored by the compiler.

Multi-line comments
The compiler ignores any text from /* to the nearest */. It can be used for multiple and single-line
comments.

class Program {
public static void main(String[] args) {
/* This is a single-line comment */
/* This is an example of
a multi-line comment */
}
}

You can nest end-of-line comments inside multi-line comments:

class Program {
public static void main(String[] args) {
/*
System.out.println("Hello"); // print "Hello"
System.out.println("Java"); // print "Java"
*/
}
}

The part of the code above is ignored by the compiler because of the /* ... */ characters.

Java documentation comments


The compiler ignores any text from /** to */ just like it ignores multi-line comments.

These kinds of comments can be used to automatically generate documentation about your source code
by using the javadoc tool. Usually, these comments are placed above declarations of classes, interfaces,
methods and so on. Some special labels such as @param or @return are often used for controlling the
tool. However, they are optional and we will not deal with them for now. Just don't be surprised in case
you see them.

See the example below.

class Program {
/**
* The main method accepts an array of string arguments
*
* @param args from the command line
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
// do nothing
}
}

Do not be afraid if you have not understood the documentation comments completely. This will be
considered in other topics.

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