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From: gvcormack@watmum.UUCP (Gordon V. Cormack)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: I Hate "Syntactic Sugar" (contrary opinion)
Message-ID: <598@watmum.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 10-Sep-86 17:25:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: watmum.598
Posted: Wed Sep 10 17:25:35 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Sep-86 07:34:42 EDT
References: <8900044@uiucdcsb>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 24

The term "syntactic sugar" means to me "shorthand notation" or
"simplified notation" rather than just "notation".  For example
in a certain language, we might say "a + b" is syntactic sugar
for plus(a,b).

I don't find the term perjorative, except when applied by purists
who believe that any alternative forms obscure the "true semantics".
Most of us require a little syntactic sugar to swallow languages
that have a simple well-defined semantics; hence the term.

I do not claim that she is the originator, but I first saw the term
used by Barbara Liskov in describing array subscripting in CLU --
most of us could not tolerate calling a subroutine to do every 
subscripting operation and so the syntactic sugar of [] notation
was devised.

There certainly exist more fundamental differences between notations
than can be denoted "syntactic sugar".  The term should therefore
be preserved to mean trivial syntactic transformations.
-- 
Gordon V. Cormack      CS Department, University of Waterloo
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