Comments

In Chapter 1, What is Perl 6?, we've seen two ways of writing programs—by passing it in the -e command-line option or by saving it in a file. Of course, all big programs are stored in files. In this section, we will see how Perl 6 helps the programmer to organize the code better by adding comments.

Comments are parts of the source code, which are ignored by the compiler. Comments are intended to give additional information about the program itself. Good examples of comments are explanations of the algorithms used, or the purpose of variables, or a description of the input arguments of a function.

Perl 6 offers two ways of saving additional human-oriented information in the source code by using comments and the so-called Pod. First, we will examine the comments.

Comments are fragments of source code that a compiler does not consider as direct instructions for execution. In Perl 6, there are three ways of leaving comments:

• One-line comments,
• Multiline comments,
• Embedded comments.

Let's examine them in detail.