Do comments slow down an interpreted language?

Posted by mvid on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by mvid
Published on 2010-04-28T15:46:41Z Indexed on 2010/04/28 15:53 UTC
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interpreter

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interpreted-language

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comments

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python

I am asking this because I use Python, but it could apply to other interpreted languages as well (ruby, php).

Whenever I leave a comment in my code, is it slowing down the interpreter? My limited understanding of an interpreter is that it reads program expressions in as strings and converts those strings into code. It seems that every time it parses a comment, that is wasted time.

Is this the case? Is there some convention for comments in interpreted languages, or is the effect negligible?

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