Comments and whitespace

This chapter is meant to provide you with two handy tools will make it easier to read and write your own code. To begin with, let's talk about comments. Comments are a way for you to add notes and documentation to your code. To create a comment that will span a single line, begin by placing a double slash (//). Any text written after those two slashes will be ignored until the end of the line. Any code written before the double slashes is still valid and will be processed by the language.

If you wanted to write a comment that spans multiple lines, you could just use individual single-line comments for each line you wanted to include. However, there is an easier way to do so using block comments. Any text in between the markers /* and */ will be ignored, no matter how many lines the comment will span.

Now, let's talk about the use of whitespace. Whitespace are characters that don't draw any visible text on the screen, such as space, line breaks, or tabs. Within a statement, you can use as much whitespace as you like, as long as the individual components of the statement are still intact. For instance, variable names or numbers cannot contain any whitespace. The following statement serves as an example of a program that contains a lot of whitespace, but is still a valid Rouge program.