Comment Styles

Source Insight adds some explicit formatting to comments. All comments inherit from the Comment parent style. The comment style hierarchy appears below.

 

Figure 3.10  The comment styles hierarchy.

Comment Heading Styles

Comment heading styles are very useful for breaking up large chunks of code with high-level comments.

Comment Heading styles are specified with a //n comment prefix, where n is a number between 1 and 4. For example:

//1 This is a Heading 1 comment

//2 This is a Heading 2 comment

//3 This is a Heading 3 comment

//4 This is a Heading 4 comment

When the comment displays, the //n at the beginning of the comment is hidden, unless the cursor is on that line. The above lines appear like this:

 

If the cursor is on the line, then the //n will appear so that you can edit it.

 

Comment Right Style

Comments that appear to the right of code are given the "Comment Right" style. For example:

 

Single and Multi Line Comment Styles

Multi-Line comments are displayed in the Comment Multi Line style. These are any comments using the /* and */ delimiters in C/C++ and Java.

Single line comments are displayed in the Comment Line style. These include comments that start with // delimiters in C/C++ and Java.

 

Comment Styles and Custom Languages

When you define a custom language, using the Preferences: Languages dialog box, you can specify comment or text-range types, and associate them with a style. For example, you could create a comment range that starts with (* and ends with *) and the text is formatted with the "Comment Multi Line" style. You can actually define any delimited range of text, and associate it with any style (including a non-comment style).See: Symbols and Language Parsing. and Special Language Options.