Documenting programs is a very important practice all software developers should do, no matter what programming language they use. Unfortunately, documentation is often the first thing to suffer when a project is crunched for time.
If you are the only developer for a program, you might think that because you wrote the program, you should have no problem remembering how the program works. From experience, leaving a piece of code and coming back to it a year or more later is nearly equivalent to reading someone else's code, unless of course it is documented.
Managed C++, like traditional C++, provides two comment styles: the single-line comment and the multiline comment.
The single-line comment begins with a double slash (//). Anything after the double slash is a comment. Depending on where you place the double slash, you can use a single-line comment to comment an entire line or just part of a line. By the way, you probably noticed the comments in the previous example code, but here are a couple more examples:
// This entire line is a comment. Int32 x = 0; // This comment uses part of the line.
The multiline comment starts with /* and ends with */. You can place multiline comments anywhere in the code, even on different lines. You must use care with this kind of comment, as embedding a multiline comment within a multiline comment will cause errors. Here are some multiline comments:
/***************************************************** * Common comment box. You will see these frequently * * within programs. * *****************************************************/ Int32 x = 0; /* This is a comment on a single line */ Int32 y = 0; /* This is a comment that stretched for More than one line */ /* Embedded comments like this /* do not work as you might expect */ this portion would not be commented and will in this case cause errors */
Because of the embedded comment problem, many programmers, myself included, prefer to use the double slash comment.