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

I wonder if it matters on how comments are used. For example, triple quotes is a docstring. If you use them, the content is validated. I ran into a problem awhile back where I was importing a library into my Python 3 code... I got this error regarding syntax on \N. I looked at the line number and it was content within a triple quote comment. I was somewhat surprised. New to Python, I never thought a block comment would be interpreted for syntax errors.

Simply if you type:

'''
(i.e. \Device\NPF_..)
'''

Python 2 doesn't throw an error, but Python 3 reports: SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 14-15: malformed \N character escape

So Python 3 is evidently interpreting the triple quote, making sure it's valid syntax.

However, if turned into a single line comment: # (i.e. \Device\NPF_..)
No error results.

I wonder if the triple quote comments wer replaced with single lines, if a performance change would be seen.