Why is '//' style multiline comment bad (in Java)?

Question

http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/html/CodeConventions.doc4.html#286

I was reading the above section of Java coding convention and started to wonder why it says \"// com

Answer 1

The idea is that a multiline text comment is one entity - which you want to logically keep together. Line breaks in such a comment are nothing more than places to wrap text, so breaking it up into many "separate" comments makes no sense. Therefore, you construct a single comment block around the whole thing - using /* */.

For commenting out code, each line is its own logical unit, so using consecutive "//"s is ok - sometimes. This is especially true if individual lines could be commented back "in" for some reason, but not all of them. Though if you want to comment out a whole block code where it will never make sense to partially comment it in/out, you may still prefer to use /* */ - again to group everything together logically and visually.