Emacs Lisp comment conventions

Question

The Emacs Lisp Reference Manual's Appendix D.7 mentions some comment tips:

• Single semicolons (;) should be used for inline comments.
• Double semicolons (;;) should be used for line comments.
• Triple semicolons (;;;) should be used for "comments which should be considered a heading by Outline minor mode".
• Quadruple semicolons (;;;;) should be used for headings of major sections of a program.

The single and double semicolon use cases are clear, but there does not seem to be a sharp delineation between triple and quadruple semicolons.

In particular, the standard documentation for Emacs packages provided by auto-insert uses triple semicolons, never quadruple semicolons, even for the highest-level headings like file name and major sections. See example below:

;;; test.el --- A test file.                         -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-

;; Copyright (C) 2016

;; Author:  John Smith
;; Keywords: 

;; This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
;; it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
;; the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
;; (at your option) any later version.

;; This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
;; but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
;; MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
;; GNU General Public License for more details.

;; You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
;; along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

;;; Commentary:

;; 

;;; Code:



(provide 'test)
;;; test.el ends here

What are the best practices for triple and quadruple semicolons?

Update

Thanks to Stefan's answer, I have filed a bug report and made the following suggestion:

I suggest that the description for three semicolons be changed to:

Comments that start with three semicolons, ‘;;;’, are considered
top-level headings by Outline minor mode.

Four or more semicolons can be used as subheadings in hierarchical
fashion. E.g.

;;; Main heading
;;;; Sub heading
;;;;; Sub sub heading
;;;; Another sub heading
;;; Next main heading

These comments should be used to break Emacs Lisp code into sections.

A link to "Outline minor mode" in the Emacs manual would be useful: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Outline-Mode.html

The section for four semicolons can be elided.

Answer 1

Actually, 3-and-more semi-colons stand for headings, where the more semi-colons you put the deeper the nesting of the heading. So it should look like

;;; Main heading
;;;; Sub heading
;;;;; Sub sub heading
;;;; Another sub heading
;;; Next main heading