What is the meaning of "//! [#]"

Question

I was inspecting some application's source code and I found this:

//! [1]

... some code ...

//! [1]

//! [2]

... some code ....

//! [2]

//! [3]

... some more code ...

//! [3]

What is the meaning of these comments? It appears to me they were wrotten just to split the code in "sections", much like the #region and #endregion in C#.

But do they have an inner meaning besides that? Are these comments processed by the compiler?

Might be for some documentation generating tool like doxygen, but I haven't seen this particular notation before — Cory Kramer, May 13 '15 at 18:23
Could be a code standard that whoever produced the application uses. — NathanOliver, May 13 '15 at 18:25
As far as C++ is concerned, they're simply comments; the content is irrelevant. Some external tool probably processes them. — Keith Thompson, May 13 '15 at 18:26
Probably related to Doxygen or similar. It treats either `///` or `//!` as a special comment from which it extracts documentation. — Jerry Coffin, May 13 '15 at 18:57

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered May 13 '15 at 18:26

No, the compiler does not process //! [3] in a meaningful way. It ignores it (well, that and everything until the end of the line).

Maybe it was generated by some tool. Maybe the developer used it to jump from the start to the end of some block easily. Maybe the developer was very excited about numbers in square brackets.

I'd ask the developer who wrote that code.

What is the meaning of "//! [#]"

1 Answers1