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

Having comments will slow down the startup time, as the scripts will get parsed into an executable form. However, in most cases comments don't slow down runtime.

Additionally in python, you can compile the .py files into .pyc, which won't contain the comments (I should hope) - this means that you won't get a startup hit either if the script is already compiled.