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Trail: Getting Started
Lesson: A Closer Look at the "Hello World" Application

Comments in Java Code

The bold characters in the following listing are comments.
/** 
 * The HelloWorldApp class implements an application that
 * simply displays "Hello World!" to the standard output.
 */
class HelloWorldApp {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello World!"); //Display the string.
    }
}

The Java programming language supports three kinds of comments:

/* text */
The compiler ignores everything from /* to */.
/** documentation */
This indicates a documentation comment (doc comment, for short). The compiler ignores this kind of comment, just like it ignores comments that use /* and */. The JDK javadoc tool uses doc comments when preparing automatically generated documentation. For more information on javadoc, see the Javadoc tool documentation (outside of the tutorial) .
// text
The compiler ignores everything from // to the end of the line.

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