A comment is text in your program that is there only for the benefit of the human reader and is ignored by the Statistics101 program.

There are two kinds of comments in Statistics101. The first is called a line comment. The line comment is introduced by an apostrophe ('). The apostrophe may be the first character on the line, in which case the entire line is a comment, or it may be later in the line, in which case the remainder of the line is a comment and is ignored.

The second type of comment is called the "block comment". The block comment may be contained entirely on one line or it may span multiple lines. Therefore, the block comment must be enclosed between two markers, a begin comment marker (/*) and an end comment marker (*/). If you are familiar with the languages C or Java, you will recognize this convention. Anything between the two markers will be ignored by Statistics101. Only one asterisk is needed for either marker, but you may put as many as you like if you wish to highlight the comment block.

See the examples at right.

Here's an example using both kinds of comments.

/****************************************************
 What is the probability that at least two people in a 
 random group of 25 will have the same birthday?
*****************************************************/
'Set number of trials in rptCount
COPY 1000 rptCount
REPEAT rptCount
   GENERATE 25 1,365 birthdays                    'generate 25 "birthdays"
   MULTIPLES birthdays >= 2 sameBirthdayCount     /*how many duplicates, triplicates, quads etc? */
   SCORE sameBirthdayCount sameBirthdayCountScore 'keep score
END
COUNT sameBirthdayCountScore >= 1 successes       'how often were one or more birthdays replicated?
DIVIDE successes rptCount probability
PRINT probability