I am looking at some code in Scheme from Festival and cannot seem to figure out the comments. Currently, I can see ;, ;; and ;;; used to indicate comment lines. Other sources on the web indicate that some of the above maybe ways to indicate multi-line comments. My questions are:
- What is the difference between
;,;;and;;;for commenting? - When is one to be used over the other?
- Is there any other, IMO saner, way to comment code in
Scheme?
Answer
All three of the forms you mention are single-line comments. The double-semicolon may have originally arisen as a cue in Dorai Sitaram's SLaTeX typesetting package that the comment was to be typeset as ordinary text, rather than as program text.
Scheme also has multi-line comments.
In particular, it appears that R6RS, like Racket, allows the use of #| and |# to begin and end multi-line comments. Also, the utterly magnificent #; combination comments out a full s-expression. So, for instance, if you write
#;(define (terrible-function a)
(totally-broken-code
here))
The entire definition is considered commented-out.