meaning of syntactic salt
1. syntactic salt The opposite of syntactic sugar, a feature designed to make it harder to write bad code. Specifically, syntactic salt is a hoop the programmer must jump through just to prove that he knows whats going on, rather than to express a program action. Some programmers consider required type declarations to be syntactic salt. A requirement to write "end if", "end while", "end do", etc. to terminate the last block controlled by a control construct as opposed to just "end" would definitely be syntactic salt. Syntactic salt is like the real thing in that it tends to raise hackers blood pressures in an unhealthy way. Compare candygrammar. [Jargon File] syntactic sugar Term coined by Peter Landin for additions to the syntax of a language which do not affect its expressiveness but make it "sweeter" for humans to use. Syntactic sugar gives the programmer an alternative way of coding that is more succinct or more like some familiar notation. It does not affect the expressiveness of the formalism compare chrome. Syntactic sugar can be easily translated "desugared" to produce a program in some simpler "core" syntax. E. g. Cs "a[i]" notation is syntactic sugar for "*a + i". In a curried functional language, all operators are really functions and the use of infix notation "x+y" is syntactic sugar for function application "+ x y". Alan Perlis once quipped, "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. " The variants "syntactic saccharin" and "syntactic syrup" are also recorded. These denote something even more gratuitous, in that they serve no purpose at all. Compare candygrammar, syntactic salt. syntax The structure of strings in some language. A languages syntax is described by a grammar. For example, the syntax of a binary number could be expressed as binary_number = bit [ binary_number ] bit = "0" | "1" meaning that a binary number is a bit optionally followed by a binary number and a bit is a literal zero or one digit. The meaning of the language is given by its semantics. See also abstract syntax, concrete syntax.
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