Comments

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Okay, I'm going to (very quickly) cover comments. Comments let you write notes for yourself in your script without affecting how your script works.

There are two types of comments: The Single-Line comment and the Multi-Line comment. Both are ridiculously easy to use.

Lets say I've got a piece of code here and I want to explain what it does:

 
playerScore={} 
playerScore[1]=0 
playerScore[2]=0 
playerScore[3]=0 
 
playerScore[1]=5 
 

First lets add a single-line comment, above the playerScore={}. To do this you just have to type -- And then type whatever you want! Everything after an -- is ignored by lua, until the next line of course.

 
--This table holds the player's score 
playerScore={} 
playerScore[1]=0 
playerScore[2]=0 
playerScore[3]=0 
 
playerScore[1]=5 
 

Not too shabby. You can also put a single line comment after a piece of code:

 
--This table holds the player's score 
playerScore={} 
playerScore[1]=0 
playerScore[2]=0 
playerScore[3]=0 
 
playerScore[1]=5  --Set player 1's score to 5 
 

If a line of code is giving you trouble, but you don't want to get rid of it, you can use a single-line comment to make lua ignore it.

 
--This table holds the player's score 
playerScore={} 
playerScore[1]=0 
playerScore[2]=0 
playerScore[3]=0 
 
--The line below is disabled 
--playerScore[1]=5  --Set player 1's score to 5 
 

This is called commenting out. It's just disabling code by making lua ignore it.

Now that you've got the hang of single-line comments, I'll show you how to use multiline comments.

Multi-line comments allow you to comment out a large section of code with ease. This is useful for removing troublesome blocks or providing in-depth explanations as to what your code does. At it's most basic, a comment is a normal comment with a multiline string in it:

--[[
This is a comment
]]

However, people often add extra comment symbols to multiline comments, for various reasons.

--[[
This is another comment
]]--

This style is sometimes used as it is more aestetically pleasing, and can make nice hedders, such as:

--[[ PLAYER METATABLE ]]--

However, a slightly more practical style is

--[[
This is yet another comment
--]]

This style is more useful for coding out sections, as you can make it into two single line comments by deleting the first [, temporarily decommenting the code without having to delete the other end of the comment. Such as:

--[
dangerousCode()
--]]

You can comment out a whole section of code with multiline comments. Lets say for some reason I was using the following code to test something and for the time being I want to turn it off.

 
Msg("One\n") 
Msg("Two\n") 
Msg("Three\n") 
Msg("Four\n") 
Msg("Five\n") 
 

So all I need to do is place comment brackets before and after it.

 
--[[
Msg("One\n") 
Msg("Two\n") 
Msg("Three\n") 
Msg("Four\n") 
Msg("Five\n") 
--]]
 

Voila!

There's no script to write for this lesson.

ADDENDUM: Because Garry nicely put in C++ style comments, there are other ways of commenting. Single line comments:

// This is a comment
Msg( "And this is code" )

Multiline comments:

/* This
is
a
multiline
comment */
Msg( "And this is code" )

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