Three forward slashes for block commenting?

Question

First noticed this in Notepad++, where // comments and /// comments were shown in different colours.

Doxygen revealed more about it, but I'm not convinced about its efficacy.

1. Why would anyone use the three slashing commenting style when it's far easier to type /* and */? (I figure there has to be a better explanation than it being useful when nesting comments)
2. For it to be usable, do editors support block commenting for triple slashes in the way that Visual Studio has support for Ctrl+k Ctrl+c for multi-line comments?

Answer 1

1. Surely, its easier to hit the same key thrice than hitting two separate keys.
2. Don't know about other IDEs, but XCode4 supports code snippets where you can type pretty much anything. On Visual Studio, I use Visual Assist X, which gives me the same thing. XCode4 Example,Visual AssistX example. I'd have to assume other IDEs provide similar functionality.

That said, yes I have come across triple slashes too and they are generally used to indicate comments that an auto-documentation system like doxygen would pick.

Answer 2

In Visual Studio the /// indicates documentation not just comments. Following your link the explanation is the same. It is used to adorn comments that will be specifically formatted via your editor or some other tool as documentation for a class, method, namespace, etc.

Answer 3

The author might intend to put documentation after ///

At where I work, we use 3 styles of doxygen comment blocks for documentation because lack of coding style guidelines.

1. ///
2. //!
3. /** */