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.
