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:

• Stream comments. Begin with $* and end with *$. Maintain Data interprets everything between these two delimiters as part of the comment. A comment can begin on one line and end on another line, and can include up to 51 lines.

  For example:

  MAINTAIN
    $* This is a stream comment *$
     TYPE "Hello world";
     $* This is a second stream comment.
  This is still inside the second comment!     
       This is the end of the second comment *$
  $* Document the TYPE statement--> *$ TYPE "Hello again!"; $* Goodbye *$
  END

• Line comments. Begin with $$ or -* and continue to the end of the line. For example:

  MAINTAIN FILE Employee
  FOR ALL NEXT Emp_ID INTO Pay;
  -* This entire line is a comment.
  COMPUTE Pay.NewSal/D12.2;
  .
  .
  .
  END

  You can also place a comment at the end of a line of code:

  MAINTAIN FILE Employee
  FOR ALL NEXT Emp_ID INTO Pay;  $$ Put root seg into a stack
  COMPUTE Pay.NewSal/D12.2;
  .
  .
  .
  END

  You can place a comment at the end of a line containing a command that continues onto the next line:

  MAINTAIN FILE Employee
  FOR ALL NEXT Emp_ID INTO Pay  -* Put root seg into a stack
  WHERE Department IS 'MIS';
  COMPUTE Pay.NewSal/D12.2;
  .
  .
  .
  END

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.