In JavaScript does /** have any special meaning?

Question

I know I can add comments like so:

//This is a comment,
/*so is this*/

But when I do this

/**comment?*/

It has a different color in my text editor (notepad++) and I was wondering whether it has any special meaning, or if it is just a random feature of notepad++.

Here is what it looks like in the text editor:

Answer 1

Not in JavaScript itself, but some editors will treat it like a JSDoc (https://github.com/jsdoc3/jsdoc) comment to help with autocomplete, etc.

You can also run your code through something like JSDoc to automatically generate HTML documentation for your codebase.

Answer 2

No, it has not any special meaning. It's more common to use that syntax when documenting code via comments.

Answer 3

The Java 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 Java tool documentation.

// text The compiler ignores everything from // to the end of the line.

Answer 4

Probably notepad++ identifies it with two different colors just to diversify the type of comment. for a programmer a comment may be more or less important than another :)

might seem like a silly feature, but it is not