You will find that inserting short explanatory passages (usually only a line) helps explain a piece of Pop-11 program. To facilitate that Pop-11 skips over the remainder of any line that contains three semi colons thus
;;; This is a comment 3 + 5 => ;;; Print sum of 3 and 5 ** 8 /* Longer comments, going over several lines can be enclosed between the comment brackets "/*" and "*/", just like this paragraph. */All such text will be completely ignored by the Pop-11 compiler. We occasionally insert comments in one of these two formats in examples in this primer.
C programmers will recognize the extended comment syntax with opening and closing brackets "/*" and "*/". The difference is that in Pop-11 such comments can be nested, whereas they cannot in C. Thus in Pop-11 a comment can include a programming example which itself includes a comment.