NET/MASTER Network Control Language (NCL) Programmer's Guide

The Structure of an NCL Procedure
Initial NCL Procedure Development
106160 Tandem Computers Incorporated 4–5
You cannot split comment delimiters between lines. Comment delimiters split across
line boundaries are not recognized as comment delimiters. The following example
illustrates incorrect use of a comment terminator because it is split between two lines:
/* This is an example of an invalid comment because its
comment terminator is split between two lines.*
/
Comments are not recognized within quoted strings. The following example shows a
comment that is not recognized by NCL because it is within a quoted string:
&A = " Quoted string /* Assign a value to &A */ "
The comment in this example becomes part of the quoted string. The entire quoted
string, including the sequence of characters /* Assign a value to &A */, is
assigned to the variable &A. The correct way to enter this comment would be to place
it after the quoted string, as the following example shows:
&A = " Quoted string " /* Assign a value to &A */
Comments are also briefly discussed in the discussion on compiler operation in the
NonStop NET/MASTER NCL Reference Manual.
Hint Use comments to improve the readability of source code. The number of comments in a source file has
no impact on the performance of an NCL process.
Labels Labels precede NCL statements and are used to mark one or more NCL statements.
Marking statements with labels allows you to target a statement or block of statements
for execution by a core statement.
A label is a constant made up of either an unquoted string or a quoted string
(excluding hexadecimal and binary strings) suffixed by a colon (:). The maximum
length of a label (including the colon) is 250 characters. Refer to the discussion on
compiler operation in the NonStop NET/MASTER NCL Reference Manual for more
information on unquoted and quoted strings.
Note It is normal practice to use an unquoted string as a label. You would not normally use a quoted string as
a label unless you want to include nonsymbolic characters, such as control characters, as part of the label
name.