12.4 Comments

Comments can be either single or multi-line. Multi-line comments cannot nest.

Because a single-line comment can contain any Unicode code point except a LineTerminator code point, and because of the general rule that a token is always as long as possible, a single-line comment always consists of all code points from the // marker to the end of the line. However, the LineTerminator at the end of the line is not considered to be part of the single-line comment; it is recognized separately by the lexical grammar and becomes part of the stream of input elements for the syntactic grammar. This point is very important, because it implies that the presence or absence of single-line comments does not affect the process of automatic semicolon insertion (see 12.10).

Comments behave like white space and are discarded except that, if a MultiLineComment contains a line terminator code point, then the entire comment is considered to be a LineTerminator for purposes of parsing by the syntactic grammar.