Do comments slow down an interpreted language?

Question

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

Am I slowing down the interpreter whenever

Answer 1

The effect is negligable for everyday usage. It's easy to test, but if you consider a simple loop such as:

For N = 1 To 100000: Next

Your computer can process that (count to 100,000) quicker than you can blink. Ignoring a line of text that starts with a certain character will be more than 10,000 times faster.

Don't worry about it.