In his post A comment on commenting, leon.pham commented on the annoyance of remembering different commenting syntax in different langauges. It’s true, it is a lot to keep track of. Luckily, if you use a good text editor, such as emacs or vim you can offload the task of remembering what syntax to use to the editor itself. For instance emacs has two commands to aid in creating comments: one to block off a highlighted region in comments, and another to add an end of line comment. Once you learn the command for each (adding an end-of-line comment defaults to M-; in emacs, (where M is the “meta” key, or “Alt” on most keyboars) but of course you could map it to anything you want), that’s it. The editor is generally is smart enough to know what language you are current writing in (and of course you can override it when you need to), and so the universal “add a comment” command that you learn once will always add a comment in the proper syntax for the language you are currently editing! Just another motivation to learn one editor and learn it well!

I will leave it as an exercise for the vim-using reader to post information for the equivilant command in vim!