Placing an asterisk (*) in column 1 of a control statement causes the binder to treat that line as a comment. The content of column 72 is ignored on a comment line. You can include comment lines anywhere in the control statement input except within a quoted string. You can also include comments on a control statement line; anything at the end of a control statement line separated from the operands by one or more blanks will be treated as a comment. Comments are not processed by the binder but can be printed.
A line is also treated as a comment if the previous statement ends with a blank but has a nonblank character in column 72.