syntactic sugar

English

Etymology

Attributed to British computer scientist Peter Landin.

Noun

syntactic sugar (uncountable)

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

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