Comments

Comments are annotations in source code intended for human readers. The lexer recognizes comments and discards them; they do not appear in the token stream and have no effect on program behavior.

Forge supports two forms of comments: line comments and block comments.

Line Comments

LineComment → // Character* Newline

A line comment begins with // and extends to the end of the line (the next newline character or end of file). Everything after // on that line is ignored by the lexer.

// This is a line comment
let x = 42  // This is an inline comment

Line comments may appear on their own line or at the end of a line containing code.

Block Comments

BlockComment → /* Character* */

A block comment begins with /* and ends with the next occurrence of */. Block comments may span multiple lines.

/* This is a block comment */

/*
  This block comment
  spans multiple lines.
*/

let x = /* inline block comment */ 42

Block comments do not nest. The first */ encountered after a /* ends the comment, regardless of any intervening /* sequences:

/* outer /* inner */ this is NOT inside the comment */

In the example above, the comment ends at the first */, and the text this is NOT inside the comment */ would be parsed as code (and likely produce a syntax error).

Doc Comments

Forge does not currently have a dedicated doc comment syntax (such as /// or /** */). Documentation is written using regular line comments or block comments by convention.

Comments in String Literals

Comment sequences (// and /* */) within string literals are part of the string content and are not treated as comments:

let url = "https://example.com"   // The // in the string is not a comment
let msg = "use /* carefully */"    // The /* */ in the string is not a comment

Placement

Comments may appear anywhere that whitespace is permitted. They cannot appear inside tokens (e.g., in the middle of an identifier or numeric literal).