13.1 Comments

A comment in Maxima input is any text between /* and */.

The Maxima parser treats a comment as whitespace for the purpose of finding tokens in the input stream; a token always ends at a comment. An input such as a/* foo */b contains two tokens, a and b, and not a single token ab. Comments are otherwise ignored by Maxima; neither the content nor the location of comments is stored in parsed input expressions.

Comments can be nested to arbitrary depth. The /* and */ delimiters form matching pairs. There must be the same number of /* as there are */.

Examples:

(%i1) /* aa is a variable of interest */  aa : 1234;
(%o1)                         1234
(%i2) /* Value of bb depends on aa */  bb : aa^2;
(%o2)                        1522756
(%i3) /* User-defined infix operator */  infix ("b");
(%o3)                           b
(%i4) /* Parses same as a b c, not abc */  a/* foo */b/* bar */c;
(%o4)                         a b c
(%i5) /* Comments /* can be nested /* to any depth */ */ */  1 + xyz;
(%o5)                        xyz + 1