syntactic sugar

n. [coined by Peter Landin] Features added to a language or other formalism
to make it sweeter for humans, but which do not affect the expressiveness of
the formalism (compare chrome ). Used esp. when there is an obvious and
trivial translation of the sugar feature into other constructs already
present in the notation. C's a[i] notation is syntactic sugar for * (a + i).
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. Alan Perlis. The variants
syntactic saccharin and syntactic syrup are also recorded. These denote
something even more gratuitous, in that syntactic sugar serves a purpose
(making something more acceptable to humans), but syntactic saccharin or
syrup serve no purpose at all. Compare candygrammar , syntactic salt.

