[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.
