Comment Statements Any line in the SHAZAM command file that begins with * is a comment statement. These lines are ignored by SHAZAM but they will appear on the output file of results. An example is: * Summary statistics for the textile data Comment statements are very useful for documenting the work being done by the SHAZAM commands. It is recommended that comment statements be placed after every few lines of SHAZAM commands. This clarifies the type of work that is being performed and is helpful if the commands are needed in the future either by you or other users. Comment lines cannot be placed in data files. However, data files can be annotated in 2 ways. The first way is to place the documentation at the very top of the file. Then the SKIPLINES= option on the READ command must be used to skip over the text. The second way is to place the documentation at the end of the file. Before the READ command a SAMPLE command must be set to the number of observations. Then the documentation at the end of the file will be ignored by SHAZAM when the data set is loaded into SHAZAM memory. [SHAZAM Guide home]