title: Do comments slow down an interpreted language?
body: <p>I am asking this because I use Python, but it could apply to other interpreted languages as well (Ruby, PHP, JavaScript).</p>
  
  <p>Am I slowing down the interpreter whenever I leave a comment in my code? According to my limited understanding of an interpreter, it reads program expressions in as strings and then converts those strings into code. It seems that every time it parses a comment, that is wasted time.</p>
  
  <p>Is this the case? Is there some convention for comments in interpreted languages, or is the effect negligible?</p>