Can I use a hash sign (#) for commenting in PHP?

I have never, ever, seen a PHP file using hashes (#) for commenting. But today I realized that I actually can! I'm assuming there's a reason why everybody uses // instead though, so here I am.

Is there any reason, aside from personal preference, to use // rather than # for comments?

2021 UPDATE: As of PHP 8, the two characters are not the same. The sequence #[ is used for Attributes.(Thanks to i336 for the comment)

Original Answer:

The answer to the question Is there any difference between using "#" and "//" for single-line comments in PHP? is no.

There is no difference. By looking at the parsing part of PHP source code, both "#" and "//" are handled by the same code and therefore have the exact same behavior.

PHP's documentation describes the different possibilities of comments. See http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.basic-syntax.comments.php

But it does not say anything about differences between "//" and "#". So there should not be a technical difference. PHP uses C syntax, so I think that is the reason why most of the programmers are using the C-style comments '//'.