A semicolon introduces characters that are to be ignored, such as comments. The semicolon and all characters up to and including the next newline or end of file are ignored.
(+ 3 ; three
4)
→ 7
Some text editors make assumptions about desired indentation based on the number of semicolons that begin a comment. The following style conventions are common, although not by any means universal.
Comments that begin with a single semicolon are all aligned to the same column at the right (sometimes called the “comment column”). The text of such a comment generally applies only to the line on which it appears. Occasionally two or three contain a single sentence together; this is sometimes indicated by indenting all but the first with an additional space (after the semicolon).
Comments that begin with a double semicolon are all aligned to the same level of indentation as a form would be at that same position in the code. The text of such a comment usually describes the state of the program at the point where the comment occurs, the code which follows the comment, or both.
Comments that begin with a triple semicolon are all aligned to the left margin. Usually they are used prior to a definition or set of definitions, rather than within a definition.
Comments that begin with a quadruple semicolon are all aligned to the left margin, and generally contain only a short piece of text that serve as a title for the code which follows, and might be used in the header or footer of a program that prepares code for presentation as a hardcopy document.
;;;; Math Utilities ;;; FIB computes the the Fibonacci function in the traditional ;;; recursive way. (defun fib (n) (check-type n integer) ;; At this point we're sure we have an integer argument. ;; Now we can get down to some serious computation. (cond ((< n 0) ;; Hey, this is just supposed to be a simple example. ;; Did you really expect me to handle the general case? (error "FIB got ~D as an argument." n)) ((< n 2) n) ;fib[0]=0 and fib[1]=1 ;; The cheap cases didn't work. ;; Nothing more to do but recurse. (t (+ (fib (- n 1)) ;The traditional formula (fib (- n 2)))))) ; is fib[n-1]+fib[n-2].