part igetting started with python adding comments people create notes for themselves all the time when you need to buy groceriesyou look through your cabinetsdetermine what you needand write it down on list when you get to the storeyou review your list to remember what you need using notes comes in handy for all sorts of needssuch as tracking the course of conversation between business partners or remembering the essential points of lecture humans need notes to jog their memories comments in source code are just another form of note you add them to the code so that you can remember what task the code performs later the following sections describe comments in more detail understanding comments computers need some special way to determine that the text you're writing is commentnot code to execute python provides two methods of defining text as comment and not as code the first method is the single-line comment it uses the number sign (#)like thisthis is comment print("hello from python!"#this is also comment single-line comment can appear on line by itself or it can appear after executable code it appears on only one line you typically use single-line comment for short descriptive textsuch as an explanation of particular bit of code when you need to create longer commentyou use multiline comment multiline comment both starts and ends with three double quotes (""")like this""applicationcomments py written byjohn purposeshows how to use comments ""everything between the two sets of triple double quotes is considered comment you typically use multiline comments for longer explanations of who created an applicationwhy it was createdand what tasks it performs of coursethere aren' any hard rules on precisely how you use comments the main goal is to tell the computer precisely what is and isn' comment so that it doesn' become confused