2.2 Whitespace and comments

Whitespace characters are spaces and newlines. (Implementations typically provide additional whitespace characters such as tab or page break.) Whitespace is used for improved readability and as necessary to separate tokens from each other, a token being an indivisible lexical unit such as an identifier or number, but is otherwise insignificant. Whitespace may occur between any two tokens, but not within a token. Whitespace may also occur inside a string, where it is significant.

A semicolon (;) indicates the start of a comment. The comment continues to the end of the line on which the semicolon appears. Comments are invisible to Scheme, but the end of the line is visible as whitespace. This prevents a comment from appearing in the middle of an identifier or number.

  ;;; The FACT procedure computes the factorial
  ;;; of a non-negative integer.
  (define fact
    (lambda (n)
      (if (= n 0)
          1        ;Base case: return 1
          (* n (fact (- n 1))))))