Comments are used to annotate, describe, or explain code that is complex or difficult to understand. Python will intentionally ignore comments when it compiles to bytecode by the interpreter. <ahref='https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#comments'target='_blank'rel='nofollow'>`PEP 8`</a> has a section dealing with comments. They also increase the readablity of code by adding easy and descriptive language for better understanding.
Alternatively you could use `'''` to write a a comment that spans multiple lines to avoid having to use the `#`.
For example:
```python
'''
This is a multiline comment,
everything inside the three
apostrophes will be regarded
by Python as a comment and
ignored when running a program
'''
```
Another type of comment is the **docstring**, documented in [`PEP 257`](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0257/). Docstrings are a specific type of comment that becomes the `__doc__` attribute.
For a string literal to be a docstring, it must start and end with `"""` and be the first statement of the module, function, class, or method definition it is documenting:
String literals that start and end with `"""` that are not docstrings (not the first statement), can be used for multiline strings. They will not become `__doc__` attributes. If they are not assigned to a variable, they will not generate bytecode. There is some discussion about using them as multiline comments found [Multiline Comments in Python - Stack Overflow](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7696924/multiline-comments-in-python).