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.