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Application Programming: Creating and Running Programs in IDL |
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Commenting code and limiting line length both promote readability. See the following sections for details.
In IDL, the semicolon (;) is the comment character. When IDL encounters the semicolon, it ignores the remainder of the line. It is good programming practice to fully annotate programs with comments. There are no execution-time or space penalties for comments in IDL.
A comment can exist on a line by itself, or can follow another IDL statement, as shown below:
; This is a comment COUNT = 5 ; Set the variable COUNT equal to 5.
| Note You can also comment or uncomment blocks of code in the IDL Editor window. See Commenting Blocks of Code for details. |
The line continuation character ($) allows you to break a single IDL statement into multiple lines. The dollar sign at the end of a line indicates that the current statement is continued on the following line. The dollar sign character can appear anywhere a space is legal except within a string constant or between a function name and the first open parenthesis. Any number of continuation lines are allowed.
IDL Online Help (March 06, 2007)