8.2 Comments

A comment is text that is written in a program only for the sake of humans that read the program, and that has no effect on the meaning of the program. In Lisp, a semicolon (‘;’) starts a comment if it is not within a string or character constant. The comment continues to the end of line. The Lisp reader discards comments; they do not become part of the Lisp objects which represent the program within the Lisp system.

The ‘#@count’ construct, which skips the next count characters, is useful for program-generated comments containing binary data. The SXEmacs Lisp byte compiler uses this in its output files (see Byte Compilation). It isn’t meant for source files, however.

See Comment Tips, for conventions for formatting comments.