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. C's
"a[i]" notation is syntactic sugar for "*(a + i)". In a
(curried) functional language, all operators are really
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,