Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!otter!kers
From: kers@otter.hple.hp.com (Christopher Dollin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Origin of the term "syntactic sugar"
Message-ID: <2400019@otter.hple.hp.com>
Date: 7 Nov 88 16:16:36 GMT
References: <444@grand.UUCP>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK.
Lines: 14

Harry said:

| I first saw the term used in the CLU reference manual.  The manual was first
| published as an MIT Tech report (1978?). (p 43 in the Springer Verlag version).

When I was at Oxford (1976-1979) I was told that the late Christopher
Strachey had had a student who, after some unpleasant experiences with some
programming language (or tool) had complained of "syntactic alum", by analogy.

This suggests that the term predates 1976 at least. Here's my *completely
unsupported guess* (tm) for the originator: Peter Landin.

Regards,
Kers.