Beginning AppleScript®

1.7. Adding Comments to Your Programs

As you start writing larger AppleScript programs, it is a good habit to document your program. You can do this directly in the program by inserting comments. A comment describes to the reader of the program the intentions of a particular sequence of code. Not only is this helpful when you go back months later to look at code that you wrote, but it can also aid the person who has to maintain your code.

You can insert a comment into an AppleScript program in one of two ways:

• By typing two consecutive hyphen characters (--) followed by any characters you want. Any characters that appear on the line after the two hyphens are ignored when the code is compiled.

• By typing an open parenthesis and an asterisk [(*] followed by your comments spread out over as many lines as you like. You terminate this comment style by typing an asterisk and close parenthesis [*)].

Here's an example of the first type of comment:

-- This program will resize all selected images to a specified size

And here's an example of the second type of comment:

(*
This program creates an alphabetized list
of all of the songs in someone's iTunes library

Version 1.1 created 2/22/05
Stephen Kochan
*)

You can mix and match your comment styles. And the second form of commenting can itself include comments. That is, comments can be nested.

The double hyphen is often used to add a single-line comment or a comment at the end of a line. In addition to its use for multiline comments, the paren-star ...