What are the comments found above methods in a controller?-CodePudding

This may be a silly question, but I'm new to back-end development.

I always see comments like this above various methods:

/**
 * Display a listing of the resource.
 * 
 * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response
 */
public function index()
{
    // ...
}

What are these called? Do they even have a name? Does the @return actually do anything, or is it just for reference?

I'm mostly asking because I have a technical interview as a junior Laravel developer coming up this week, and I want to make sure all my code is up to standards for a pair-programming session they said might happen.

CodePudding user response：

These are called "DocBlocks", or Documentation Block Comments, etc. You can read more about them here:

Additionally, if I go to use this method, I get some help:

As you can see, VSCode now knows what myMethod is, what it expects and returns, how to use it, etc. They aren't strictly required, as some IDEs can auto-detect methods, arguments and returns, but they can help.