Comments
All programmers strive to make their code easy to understand, but sometimes extra explanation is warranted. In these cases, programmers leave comments in their source code that the interpreter will ignore but people reading the source code may find useful.
Here’s a simple comment:
-- hello, world
In Calyxium, the idiomatic comment style starts a comment with two dashes, and the
comment continues until the end of the line. For comments that extend beyond a
single line, you’ll need to include -- on each line, like this:
-- So we're doing something complicated here, long enough that we need
-- multiple lines of comments to do it! Whew! Hopefully, this comment will
-- explain what's going on.
Documentation Comments
Calyxium also supports a second kind of comment, documentation comments. These are used to provide structured, tool-readable documentation for your code, such as functions, constants, or modules.
Here’s a simple documentation comment:
-- $ hello, world i am a documentation comment $
In Calyxium, documentation comments follow the same syntax rules as normal comments, but with a special marker (-- $ ... $) to distinguish them. These comments are designed to integrate with your text editor to provide features like:
- Hover tooltips
For example:
-- $ Returns the square of a number $
let square(x) {
x * x
}
To enable documentation comment support in your editor, install the calyxium-lang Extension.