:syntactic salt: n. 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}. .
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
