syntactic sugar

Attributed to by British computer scientist Peter Landin.

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syntactic sugar (uncountable)

1. (programming) Additions to the syntax of a programming language that make code easier for humans to read or write, but that do not change the functionality or expressiveness of the language.

   Coordinate term: syntactic salt

   In fact, this is how lists are actually built, by consing all elements to the empty list, []. The commas-and-brackets notation is just syntactic sugar, a more pleasant way to write code. So [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] is exactly equivalent to 1:2:3:4:5:[]. ^WB

• desugar
• desugared
• syntactic saccharin
• syntactic salt
• syntactic syrup

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• syntactic sugar on Wikipedia.Wikipedia