syntactic salt

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.

[Jargon File]