I feel I need to justify myself a little by quoting the part of Learning Perl which inspired this thread.

Perl comments are like (modern) shell comments. Anything 
from an unquoted pound sign (#) to the end of the line is a 
comment. There are no C-like multiline comments.
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I mean, no disrespect to merlyn, it's the truth, it's nothing but the truth, but it's not the whole truth.
--

“Every bit of code is either naturally related to the problem at hand, or else it's an accidental side effect of the fact that you happened to solve the problem using a digital computer.”
M-J D