Do comments slow down an interpreted language?

python comments interpreter interpreted-language
Mantas Vidutis picture Mantas Vidutis · Apr 28, 2010 · Viewed 12.6k times · Source

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 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.

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

Answer

Luper Rouch picture Luper Rouch · Apr 28, 2010

For the case of Python, source files are compiled before being executed (the .pyc files), and the comments are stripped in the process. So comments could slow down the compilation time if you have gazillions of them, but they won't impact the execution time.

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