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
what's 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.