14 lines
753 B
Plaintext
14 lines
753 B
Plaintext
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.
|
|
|