AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Comments

AppleScript permits two kinds of comment : single-line comments and delimited comments. Everything including and after two successive hyphens on a line is a single-line comment. For example:

set a to 1 -- this a comment on the same line as a command
-- this a comment on a line by itself

The comment delimiters are (* and *). Everything between comment delimiters is a comment. Such a comment may span multiple lines. This code contains three stretches of text that are legally commented out with comment delimiters:

set a to 1 (* because we feel like it;
tomorrow we may not feel like setting a to 1 *)
(* in fact things could be very different tomorrow,
but I really can't speak to that issue just now *)
set b to 2 (* this seems a good idea too *)

A comment delimited with comment delimiters may not interrupt a command, nor precede a command on the same line. Neither of these lines will compile:

set a to (* because we feel like it *) 1
(* here's a good idea *) set a to 1

Comment delimiters attempt to be "intelligent." Comments may be nested, in which case the delimiters must match in pairs. Thanks to this rule, you can easily comment out a stretch of script that already contains some comments:

(* outer comment
(* inner comment *)
rest of outer comment *)

A rather weird side effect of this "intelligence" is that quotation marks and vertical bars inside comment delimiters must also match in pairs:

(* "this works fine" and so does |this| *)

If you remove one quotation mark or one vertical bar ...