### 2.12 Commenting input files

A comment is a remark for the human reader of the music input, it is ignored and has no effect on the printed output. There are two types of comments. The percent symbol `%` introduces a line comment; the rest of the line is ignored. A block comments marks a whole section of music input, anything that is enclosed in `%{` and `%}` is ignored. The following fragment shows possible uses for comments

         % notes for twinkle twinkle follow
         c4 c  g' g  a a

         %{
             This line, and the notes below
             are ignored, since they are in a
             block comment.

             g g f f e e d d c2
         %}

There is a special statement that really is a kind of comment. The version statement marks for which version of LilyPond the file was written. To mark a file for version 2.1.17, use

         \version "2.1.17"

These annotations make future upgrades of LilyPond go more smoothly. Changes in the syntax are handled with a special program, convert-ly (see Invoking convert-ly), and it uses `\version` to determine what rules to apply.

Read comments on this page, or add one. This page is for LilyPond-2.2.2 (stable-branch).