Comment

As mentioned in the postfix section, traditional Lua comments prevent the implementation of the decrementation operator (--). To disable the traditional single-line Lua comment, one can use --!comment. Once the compiler sees that this macro is specified, single-line comments will transition over to the # sign and the -- operator will replace --- for decrementation.

Below is a code segment that would yield an error at compilation after applying the --!comment macro.

--!comment

-- this is an invalid comment (and code)
local v = 1
print(v---)

The following code segment demonstrates the correct usage of the --!comment macro and the syntax change it produces.

--!comment

# Valid new comment
local v = 1
print(v--)

An alternative to this approach of managing the conflicting comment and decrement operator issue would be to use reassignments (var = var - 1) or compound assignments (var -= 1).