Adding Comments

By adding comments to a procedure, you can document its logic, making it easier to maintain. You can place a comment on its own line, at the end of a command, or even in the middle of a command. You can also place a comment in the middle of the procedure, at the very beginning of the procedure before the MAINTAIN command, or at the very end of the procedure following the END command. You can place any text within a comment.

There are two types of comments:

You can include all types of comments in the same procedure:

MAINTAIN
   TYPE "Hello world"; -* This is a TYPE command
   $* This is a stream comment
      that runs onto a second line *$ 
$* Document the TYPE statement--> *$ TYPE "Hello again!"; $$ Goodbye
.
.
.
END

While Maintain Data uses the same comment characters (-*) as Dialogue Manager, it is only in a Maintain Data procedure that comments can be placed at the end of a line of code.